{"id":946577,"url":"https://alion.io/job/plus-seniorstaff-research-engineer-vision-language-action-models-autonomous-driving","title":"Senior/Staff Research Engineer — Vision-Language-Action Models (Autonomous Driving)","company":{"id":22363,"name":"Plus","domain":"plus.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/plus","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"is_intermediary":false,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":70,"open_postings":40,"ghost_share":0.5,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-09-23T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Santa Clara, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":170000,"max":260000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":260000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"JAX","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"TensorFlow","optional":false},{"name":"Vision-Language-Action","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":true},{"name":"ONNX","optional":true},{"name":"Quantization","optional":true},{"name":"TensorRT","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-15T01:07:40Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-15","last_verified_at":"2026-09-23T14:35:36Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":8,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":8},"description":"You will join our core AI team at the frontier of autonomous decision-making, building the Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that form SuperDrive's reasoning layer. You'll train VLA models that generate high-level driving decisions and trajectory guidance for on-board strategic decision-making, and design the knowledge distillation and compression techniques that transition large models onto on-board compute.\nResponsibilities\n Design, train, and evaluate Vision-Language-Action models that generate high-level driving decisions and trajectory guidance in support of Plus's reasoning layer.\n Own a VLA workstream end to end - data, architecture, large-scale training, and on-vehicle validation.\nBuild training and evaluation pipelines and rigorous metrics for VLA performance in driving contexts.\nDevelop distillation and compression recipes to deploy large reasoning models on on-board compute.\nApply SFT and RL post-training to improve reasoning, robustness, and long-tail behavior.\nCollaborate with perception, planning, and platform teams to bring models from research to production\nRequired qualifications\nM.S. minimum, Ph.D. preferred in CS, EE, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.\n3+ years implementing and training models in a deep learning framework (PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX).\nDirect, hands-on experience training vision-language / vision-language-action models.\nHands-on experience with model training, evaluation, and deployment in production.\n Thorough understanding of state-of-the-art vision-language / VLA models, diffusion, flow matching, and transformers.\nExperience with large-scale / distributed model training.\nPreferred Qualifications\nModel distillation, quantization, and inference optimization (ONNX/TensorRT, mixed precision, custom kernels).\nSFT and RL post-training of large multimodal models.\nHands-on experience with multi-modal sensor data (camera, LiDAR, radar).\nPublications at top venues (CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL, RSS, ICRA).\n Autonomous driving / ADAS experience.","description_format":"text","description_chars":2022,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"master","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"},{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Autonomous Driving","Road Transport"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-15T21:10:44Z"}],"liveness":{"score":59,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.588,"p_room":1,"age_days":8,"expected_fill_days":55,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-09-23T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":260000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/plus-seniorstaff-research-engineer-vision-language-action-models-autonomous-driving","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/plus-seniorstaff-research-engineer-vision-language-action-models-autonomous-driving.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-23T15:28:02Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers"}}