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

PlusAI is a Physical AI company developing AI-based virtual driver software for autonomous trucks. The Senior/Staff Research Engineer will build Vision-Language-Action models for autonomous decision-making, including training, evaluation, distillation, compression, and deployment on onboard compute. The role will also collaborate with perception, planning, and platform teams to transition models from research to production.

Responsibilities:

• Design, train, and evaluate Vision-Language-Action models that generate high-level driving decisions and trajectory guidance in support of Plus's reasoning layer
• Own a VLA workstream end to end — data, architecture, large-scale training, and on-vehicle validation
• Build training and evaluation pipelines and rigorous metrics for VLA performance in driving contexts
• Develop distillation and compression recipes to deploy large reasoning models on on-board compute
• Apply SFT and RL post-training to improve reasoning, robustness, and long-tail behavior
• Collaborate with perception, planning, and platform teams to bring models from research to production