Staff AI/ML Software Engineer, Model Distillation & Fine-Tuning (Automotive AI)

Location: Hybrid in Mountain View, CA or Seattle, WA, with at least three days per week in the office

Salary: $189,300–$290,700 annually, plus bonus potential

Company

Develops automotive technologies and multimodal AI capabilities for safer, more connected vehicles.

What you will do

• Design and build knowledge-distillation pipelines that transfer reasoning, vision, and language capabilities into compact edge models.
• Apply parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as LoRA and QLoRA to language and vision-language models for in-vehicle interaction.
• Build reinforcement-learning and human-in-the-loop alignment loops using RLHF and DPO.
• Curate, evaluate, and synthetically generate datasets for passenger-intent recognition and cabin-vision understanding.
• Implement quantization-aware training and optimize models for representative vehicle hardware.
• Define evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, safety constraints, and the foundation-model strategy.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, machine learning, data science, mathematics, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering or applied ML research experience, including setting technical direction and making ML architecture decisions.
• Deep proficiency in PyTorch.
• Hands-on experience fine-tuning large language models or vision-language models.
• Practical experience with at least two of knowledge distillation, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, pruning, or quantization.
• Based in or willing to work hybrid from Mountain View, CA or Seattle, WA, with office attendance at least three days per week.

Nice to have

• Master’s degree or Ph.D. in computer science, artificial intelligence, or a related field.
• Experience shipping quantized models to specific hardware targets and resolving accuracy regressions.
• Familiarity with Hugging Face, DeepSpeed, Ray, Megatron, and large-scale dataset pipelines.
• Experience in conversational AI, human-computer interaction, smart spaces, or consumer multimodal products.
• Open-source contributions or published research in model compression, distillation, or efficient AI.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work supporting applied AI development for future vehicles.
• Bonus potential based on company, job-level, and individual performance.
• Potential eligibility for relocation benefits.
• Eligibility for a company vehicle evaluation program after a successful motor vehicle report review, subject to program requirements.
• Employee benefits and rewards supporting well-being at work and at home.

Hiring process

• Role-related assessment and pre-employment screening may be required where applicable.