AI Lead - Autonomous Driving/Reasoning/Vision Language Action Models

Company:
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Job Area:
Engineering Group, Engineering Group > ADAS R&D Systems

General Summary:

Qualcomm's Autonomous Driving team is defining the future of safe, intelligent transportation. We are seeking an AI Lead, Autonomous Driving to lead the design and development of our next generation E2E Driving models (VLA, World model based,...) for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). AI systems that enable vehicles to perceive, reason, and act in complex real-world driving scenarios. This role combines cutting edge research with practical deployment on Qualcomm's advanced automotive-grade AI platforms.


What You'll Do

• Research the latest trends in autonomous driving AI, End-to-End stack, World Models and VLA model development to inform Qualcomm's autonomous driving roadmap.

• Design and develop e2e Driving Models for ADAS and autonomous driving applications.

• Build and maintain training pipelines , datasets, and evaluation benchmarks for autonomous driving AI.

• Establish metrics, evaluation frameworks, and simulation strategies for robust system validation (real-world + simulation).

• Optimize models for real-time, on-device performance on Qualcomm automotive platforms (edge AI deployment, acceleration, efficiency).

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams across software, hardware, product, and partner ecosystems to deliver production-grade systems.

• Mentor engineers and contribute to building a high-performing AI systems team .

Minimum Qualifications:
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 8+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience.
OR
Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 7+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience.
OR
PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 6+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or related field (PhD preferred).
• Strong experience in deep learning, autonomous driving stacks (transformers, VLMs, multimodal models) and autonomous driving AI system deployments .
• Proficiency in Python and frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Proven experience in system design and integration across complex AI stacks .
• Experience deploying AI systems on embedded/edge platforms with real-time constraints.
• Strong understanding of automotive software stacks , simulation environments, and validation workflows.
• Background in vision-language models, policy learning, or autonomous driving foundation models.
• Experience with autonomous driving dataset curation, sensor simulation, or sim-to-real transfer.
• Knowledge of model compression techniques (quantization, distillation) for efficient deployment.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work in a collaborative, fast-paced environment.

Why Join Us?

• Work on cutting edge autonomous driving AI that bridges research and real-world impact.
• Collaborate with worldclass teams building the next generation of intelligent autonomous vehicles and ADAS solutions.
• Access to advanced hardware, simulation tools, and Qualcomm's AI acceleration technologies.

Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer. If you are an individual with a disability and need an accommodation during the application/hiring process, rest assured that Qualcomm is committed to providing an accessible process. You may e-mail View email address on click.appcast.io or call Qualcomm's toll-free number found here. Upon request, Qualcomm will provide reasonable accommodations to support individuals with disabilities to be able participate in the hiring process. Qualcomm is also committed to making our workplace accessible for individuals with disabilities. (Keep in mind that this email address is used to provide reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. We will not respond here to requests for updates on applications or resume inquiries).

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Pay range and Other Compensation & Benefits :
$211,900.00 - $317,900.00

The above pay scale reflects the broad, minimum to maximum, pay scale for this job code for the location for which it has been posted. Even more importantly, please note that salary is only one component of total compensation at Qualcomm. We also offer a competitive annual discretionary bonus program and opportunity for annual RSU grants (employees on sales-incentive plans are not eligible for our annual bonus). In addition, our highly competitive benefits package is designed to support your success at work, at home, and at play. Your recruiter will be happy to discuss all that Qualcomm has to offer - and you can review more details about our US benefits at this link.

If you would like more information about this role, please contact Qualcomm Careers.