Senior ML Engineer - VLM

Salary: $177,300 - 212,800 per year Requirements:

• We are looking for someone who is highly skilled in the field and able to handle complex, high-impact work with minimal supervision and strong independent judgment.
• We need an engineer who can influence across team boundaries, own technical solutions, build consensus, and mentor other engineers.
• We require a Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline with 6+ years of relevant experience, or a Masters degree in a related technical field with 3+ years of experience.
• We expect hands-on experience in computer vision and deep learning, including model training and at least two of the following: 2D/3D object detection, tracking, sensor fusion, semantic segmentation, BEV, or depth estimation.
• We are seeking experience with multimodal or vision-language models, including open-vocabulary or zero-shot recognition, dense captioning, or semantic embeddings and search applied to perception data.
• We value experience building data curation pipelines and targeted datasets that improve downstream model performance, along with large-scale Parquet data processing.
• We need familiarity with distributed ML and data frameworks such as PyTorch, Lightning, Ray, Spark, or similar tools for training and large-scale processing.
• We require experience with scaled MLOps and tooling, including experiment tracking, model registries, MLflow or Weights & Biases, and ML metrics, evaluation, and quality workflows.
• We are looking for strong Python development skills, plus experience with VDI and cloud-based development environments, CI systems such as GitHub Actions, and Docker.
• Bonus experience includes end-to-end or VLA driving models, trajectory and action grounding, reasoning-trace datasets, auto-labeling foundation models, high-throughput serving tools, semantic retrieval, AV data standards, cloud orchestration, visualization tools, and evaluation or research experience.

• We own the offline dataset pipeline, designing, building, testing, and deploying cloud-based systems that transform logged multi-sensor data into VLM/VLA training datasets.
• We develop VLM-assisted auto-labeling capabilities such as open-vocabulary detection, dense captioning, semantic enrichment, and scene or scenario description generation.
• We produce reasoning-grounded annotations aligned to ego-motion and trajectories to support VLA training and explainable driving behavior.
• We identify rare, difficult, and high-uncertainty scenarios and curate datasets that improve downstream model performance.
• We define dataset schemas, quality metrics, and validation processes, and we route model failures back into relabeling and retraining loops.
• We partner closely with the end-to-end model team to define dataset specifications, maintain quality standards, and support a continuous dataset delivery cycle.
• We scale our work on cloud infrastructure using distributed, reproducible pipelines, columnar data formats, version control, and disciplined software practices.
• We lead projects, mentor less-experienced engineers, run design reviews, set coding and annotation standards, and align across organizational interfaces.
• We stay current on advances in multimodal models, auto-labeling, and end-to-end autonomous driving, and we translate relevant research into production data systems.

• 3D
• Cloud
• Computer Vision
• Docker
• GitHub
• Support
• LESS
• MLflow
• MLOps
• Model Training
• PyTorch
• Python
• Robotics
• Sensor Fusion
• Spark
• AI
• AWS
• Lambda
• Databricks
• DevOps
• LLM
• Model Serving
• OpenGL
• REST
• ROS
• Terraform
• pandas
• vLLM

More:

We are Torc, a leader in autonomous driving since 2007 and now part of the Daimler family, focused on developing software for automated trucks to transform how freight moves. Our team sits within Offline Perception and owns the high-quality training data that powers our AV 3.0 strategy and end-to-end Vision-Language-Action models. We offer a collaborative, energetic, and team-focused culture, along with a competitive compensation package that includes bonus and stock options, fully paid medical, dental, and vision premiums for full-time employees, a 401(k) with a 6% employer match, flexible scheduling, generous paid vacation, company-wide holiday closures, and AD&D and life insurance. We are committed to diversity and inclusion and encourage applicants to apply even if they do not meet every qualification. The hiring range for this US role is $177,300 to $212,800 USD.

last updated 33 week of 2026