Applied Researcher

Job description

Aurora’s mission is to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly.

Architectural Exploration: Deep dive into VLM/VLA architectures to determine their viability for our specific problem sets.
Technical Mentorship: Act as the subject matter expert and guide for an exceptionally capable engineering team eager to move into this space.
Practical Implementation: Bridge the gap between high-level academic theory and practical, scalable applications.
Innovation: Redesign and optimize model architectures to leverage high-performance computing environments like Aurora.

PhD Graduate in AI, Computer Science, or Robotics (Top-tier research lab background)
Deep expertise in Vision-Language Models (VLM) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models
Hands-on experience with 'jagged edges'—knowing where current architectures fail and how to troubleshoot them
Practical researcher: Ability to translate complex papers into production-ready code
Collaborative Guide: Willingness to mentor existing team members and bridge the knowledge gap
Excitement for large-scale infrastructure and supercomputing environments (e.g., Aurora)
Architectural Creativity: Ability to rethink and redo entire model architectures rather than just fine-tuning
Strong programming skills in Python