Aurora Innovation
Applied Researcher
$223K–$396K
Pittsburgh, PA +3 · Hybrid · 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; top-tier research lab background required.
About the job
Explore and redesign vision-language-action model architectures for self-driving applications, translating research into scalable implementations and guiding an engineering team.
What you'll do
- Assess VLM/VLA architectures for Aurora’s problem sets and identify model failure points.
- Redesign and optimize architectures for high-performance computing environments.
- Translate academic research into practical implementations and mentor engineering team members.
What they ask for
- PhD 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 troubleshooting where current architectures fail.
- 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.
- Interest in large-scale infrastructure and supercomputing environments.
Pay
USD $247,000 - $396,000 per year base salary (San Francisco, CA; Mountain View, CA; Seattle, WA); USD $223,000 - $357,000 per year base salary (Pittsburgh, PA)
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.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative