Applied Researcher

In the Aurora Driver role, you will help build a new era of mobility and logistics by leading the technical vision for Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models. You will identify weaknesses in state‑of‑the‑art architectures and rebuild them from the ground up while mentoring a high‑performing engineering team. Responsibilities Architectural exploration of VLM/VLA architectures to determine viability for our problem sets. Act as subject‑matter expert and mentor for a capable engineering team. Bridge the gap between academic theory and scalable, production‑ready implementations. Redesign and optimize model architectures for high‑performance computing environments. Qualifications PhD graduate in AI, Computer Science, or Robotics from a top‑tier research laboratory. Deep expertise in Vision‑Language Models and Vision‑Language‑Action models. Experience analyzing and troubleshooting the weaknesses of current architectures. Strong research background with ability to translate papers into production code. Willingness to mentor and bridge knowledge gaps within the team. Excitement for large‑scale infrastructure and supercomputing environments. Ability to rethink entire model architectures rather than fine‑tuning. Strong programming skills in Python. Proficiency in modern C++. Equal Opportunity Employer Aurora considers candidates with no regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy status, parent or caregiver status, ancestry, political affiliation, veteran and/or military status, physical or mental disability, or any other status protected by federal or state law. Aurora considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local law. We are also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at View email address on click.appcast.io. For California applicants, information collected and processed as part of your application and any job applications you choose to submit is subject to Aurora’s California Employment Privacy Policy. #J-18808-Ljbffr