Aurora
Applied Researcher
$223K–$396K
Pittsburgh, PA +3 · Remote · Full-time · Posted Aug 4, 2026
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
Mountain View, CA
San Francisco, CA
Seattle, WA - Education
- PhD in AI, Computer Science, or Robotics
About the job
Explore, redesign, and implement Vision-Language-Action model architectures for Aurora’s self-driving technology, while guiding engineers and translating research into scalable applications.
What you'll do
- Assess VLM/VLA architectures for Aurora’s problem sets and identify where current models fail.
- Redesign and optimize model architectures for high-performance computing environments.
- Mentor engineering team members and translate academic research into practical, production-ready implementations.
What they ask for
- PhD graduate in AI, Computer Science, or Robotics, with a top-tier research lab background.
- Deep expertise in Vision-Language Models (VLM) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, including experience troubleshooting architectural failures.
- Ability to translate research papers into production-ready code and rethink model architectures beyond fine-tuning.
- Strong programming skills in Python.
Nice to have
- Strong depth in modern C++ programming.
- Excitement for large-scale infrastructure and supercomputing environments.
Pay
$247,000 - $396,000 per year (base salary); $223,000 - $357,000 per year (base salary)
Tools
Vision-Language Models (VLM), Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, Python, C++
AI focus
Research, evaluate, redesign, and optimize VLM/VLA architectures for self-driving applications, including identifying model failure points and translating research into scalable implementations.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative