Senior ML Research Scientist, VLM VLA

Nuro

Mountain View, California

Full Time

Posted March 24, 2026

$184k - $276k

Not Specified

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Job Description

Develop and optimize vision-language-action models for autonomous vehicle behavior planning to enhance safe decision-making in complex driving scenarios, integrating multimodal perception, reasoning, and planning systems for real-world deployment.

Key Responsibilities

Develop and advance vision-language-action (VLA) models for onboard Behavior Planning in autonomous driving systems
Build multimodal models to improve safe decision-making in complex driving scenarios
Research and apply state-of-the-art approaches in multimodal representation learning and foundation models for autonomy
Train, fine-tune, and evaluate large-scale VLAs using real-world driving data
Optimize models for onboard deployment, focusing on inference efficiency, latency, memory usage, and runtime performance
Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define training, evaluation, and deployment requirements
Design evaluation methodologies for multimodal models in safety-critical applications
Contribute to scalable model and data pipelines supporting rapid experimentation and deployment

Requirements

You have an M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, or a closely related field.
You have 5 years of industry and/or research experience in machine learning, with a focus on large-scale model development.
You have strong experience with vision-language models (VLMs), multimodal foundation models, VLAs, or related architectures.
You have hands-on experience with large-scale model training, fine-tuning, and evaluation.
You have familiarity with core model components and techniques relevant to modern multimodal systems, such as Vision Transformers (ViTs) and large language models (LLMs).
You have experience optimizing models for deployment, including inference speed, memory efficiency, and performance under onboard compute constraints.
You have strong programming skills in Python and experience with modern deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, and/or TensorFlow.