Senior AI Inference Engineer - Model Optimization & Deployment

The Perception team is pioneering the development of a multi-modality foundation model to drive the next generation of autonomous system intelligence.

As a Model Optimization & Deployment Engineer, you will focus on bringing highly efficient, production-ready large-scale models to our on-vehicle stack. We are looking for experts with hands-on experience in compressing, accelerating, and deploying complex models (LLMs, VLMs, or FMs) for power- and thermal-constrained vehicle SOCs. You will optimize the ML models, write custom CUDA kernels, and build highly concurrent inference code to ensure real-time, deterministic execution on edge devices.

In this role, you will:

• Optimize large-scale models (Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion models, LLMs, VLMs) using advanced quantization (PTQ, QAT), pruning, mixed-precision inference frameworks, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA).
• Architect and implement model conversion and compilation pipelines using TensorRT for edge deployment.
• Perform rigorous parity checking, accuracy recovery, and latency benchmarking between PyTorch frameworks and compiled edge binaries.
• Develop and optimize custom ML OPs and TensorRT Plugins with efficient CUDA kernels to minimize latency and maximize memory bandwidth on AI accelerators.
• Write production-level, low latency, and memory-safe C++ and CUDA code for real-time inference on vehicle systems.

Qualifications:

• Deep expertise in model quantization (PTQ, QAT) and mixed-precision inference frameworks (INT8, FP8, FP4, BF16/FP16).
• Proven experience optimizing large-scale models (Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion models, LLMs, VLMs/VLAs) utilizing Efficient Attention mechanisms (e.g., FlashAttention, Linear Attention), KV-cache optimization (e.g., PagedAttention) and Speculative Decoding.
• Extensive experience with model conversion/compilation pipelines (e.g., ONNX, TensorRT, torch.compile) and performing rigorous latency benchmark and model quality parity valuation.
• Proficiency in low-level programming for AI accelerators, specifically developing and optimizing custom ML OPs and TensorRT Plugins with efficient CUDA kernel implementations.
• Production-level C++ (14/17/20) and Python programming skills, with experience developing concurrent, memory-safe, real-time inference code for edge devices.

Bonus Qualifications:

• Familiarity with SOTA autonomous driving perception algorithms (temporal 3D object detection, BEV, 3D Occupancy Networks) and multi-modal sensor processing (Vision, LiDAR, Radar).
• Experience with distributed training pipelines and model/tensor parallelism (PyTorch Distributed, Ray, DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM) and runtime efficiency optimization for GPU clusters.
• Experience with end-to-end autonomous driving paradigms (VLM/VLA models, Foundation models) and edge deployment technologies (e.g., TensorRT-LLM).