Staff VLA Engineer (Autonomous Driving AI)

Location: Sunnyvale, United States

Salary: $189,000–$311,220 per year

Company

hirify.global is a mobility AI company and the Global Software Center of Hyundai Motor Group, developing software-defined vehicle technologies for connected and autonomous transportation.

What you will do

• Research and prototype next-generation Vision-Language-Action architectures for autonomous driving.
• Explore scalable multimodal foundation models that improve generalization, reasoning, and long-horizon decision making.
• Build and experiment with world-model-based approaches for future-state prediction, behavior forecasting, and counterfactual simulation.
• Develop driving agents integrating reasoning, planning, memory, and action for adaptive decision making in open-world environments.
• Contribute to large driving models that unify perception, planning, and action generation.
• Turn research ideas into technical progress in collaboration with distributed, cross-functional, and cross-cultural teams across Silicon Valley and Korea.

Requirements

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Understanding of foundation models, multimodal learning, or transformer-based architectures.
• Experience training or fine-tuning large-scale vision, language, or multimodal models.
• Strong software engineering skills and experience with large-scale data pipelines.
• Ability to read, implement, and extend recent AI research, with strong collaboration and communication skills.

Nice to have

• Research experience in autonomous driving, robotics, or embodied AI.
• Experience with world models, model-based reinforcement learning, or predictive and generative simulation.
• Familiarity with VLA models, agentic AI architectures, or autonomous-driving simulation environments such as CARLA, nuPlan, or Waymo Open Dataset.
• Publications at top-tier AI, machine learning, or robotics venues.
• Experience with distributed training, model optimization, or bringing research prototypes into production.

Culture & Benefits

• Work with distributed, cross-functional, and cross-cultural teams spanning Silicon Valley and Korea.
• Applications are encouraged from U.S. veterans and candidates eligible for employment preference under applicable laws.
• Qualified individuals with disabilities receive consideration under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
• hirify.global is an equal opportunity employer committed to an inclusive workplace.

Hiring process

• Application review, coding test, first interview, second interview, offer negotiation, and hiring.
• Screening stages and schedules may vary by position and circumstances.