General Motors
Staff Research Scientist - VLM / VLA
$219K–$335K
Sunnyvale, California, United States of America · Hybrid · Staff · Full-time · Posted Aug 5, 2026
- Experience
- 5+ years in AI/ML research and applied development.
- Education
- Ph.D. in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
About the job
Leads research and development of onboard vision-language and vision-language-action models that understand driving scenes, reason about scenarios, and produce safe driving decisions in real time.
What you'll do
- Design and develop VLM/VLA models for autonomous driving, including multimodal alignment across camera, radar, LiDAR, and prompts.
- Set onboard optimization strategy using quantization, pruning, distillation, and compilation for low-latency vehicle hardware.
- Shape technical roadmaps, mentor teams, integrate models into autonomous software, and represent the organization through research and conferences.
What they ask for
- Ph.D. in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 5+ years of experience in AI/ML research and applied development.
- Deep expertise in transformers, generative AI, and multimodal systems.
- Strong Python programming skills.
Nice to have
- Research impact through top-conference publications or contributions to industry-leading systems.
- AV/ADAS experience.
Pay
$218,800.00 to $335,300.00 USD base salary
Tools
Python, transformers, camera, radar, LiDAR
AI focus
Research, train, optimize, and deploy multimodal VLM/VLA foundational models for autonomous driving, including onboard compression and real-time inference.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative