Senior/Staff Research Engineer — Vision-Language-Action Models (Autonomous Driving)

Location: Santa Clara, California, United States; hybrid workplace

Salary: $170,000–$260,000 per year

Company

hirify.global is a Physical AI company developing AI-based virtual driver software for factory-built autonomous trucks, with operations in the United States and Europe.

What you will do

• Design, train, and evaluate Vision-Language-Action models for high-level driving decisions and trajectory guidance.
• Own a VLA workstream across data, architecture, large-scale training, and on-vehicle validation.
• Build training and evaluation pipelines with rigorous metrics for driving-context performance.
• Develop distillation and compression methods for deploying reasoning models on onboard compute.
• Apply supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning post-training to improve reasoning, robustness, and long-tail behavior.
• Collaborate with perception, planning, and platform teams to move models from research into production.

Requirements

• Master’s degree minimum in computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, statistics, or a related field; Ph.D. preferred.
• 3+ years of implementing and training models with PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
• Hands-on experience training vision-language or vision-language-action models.
• Experience with model training, evaluation, and production deployment.
• Strong understanding of vision-language and VLA models, diffusion, flow matching, and transformers.
• Experience with large-scale or distributed model training.

Nice to have

• Experience with model distillation, quantization, inference optimization, ONNX/TensorRT, mixed precision, or custom kernels.
• Experience with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning post-training of large multimodal models.
• Experience with camera, LiDAR, and radar data, autonomous driving, or ADAS.
• Publications at leading computer vision, machine learning, or robotics venues.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in an innovative, future-oriented autonomous driving environment.
• Professional development opportunities.
• Catered free lunch, unlimited snacks, and beverages.
• Competitive salary and benefits package, including a 401(k) plan.