Staff VLA Engineer

The role

You will contribute to next-generation autonomous driving intelligence research. You will research and prototype Vision-Language-Action architectures and explore scalable multimodal foundation models.

What you will do

• Research and prototype next-generation Vision-Language-Action architectures
• Explore scalable multimodal foundation models for autonomous driving
• Help develop architectures with improved generalization, reasoning, and long-horizon decision making
• Support work on large driving models that unify perception, planning, and action generation
• Build and experiment with world-model-based approaches for predictive driving intelligence
• Work on future-state prediction, behavior forecasting, and counterfactual simulation
• Contribute to long-horizon planning and reasoning research for autonomous driving
• Help build models that understand complex traffic interactions and latent agent intentions
• Research goal-driven autonomous driving agents
• Help develop architectures that integrate reasoning, planning, memory, and action

Required qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
• Strong hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX)
• Solid understanding of foundation models, multimodal learning, or transformer-based architectures
• Experience training or fine-tuning large-scale models (vision, language, or multimodal)
• Strong software engineering skills and experience working with large-scale data pipelines
• Ability to read, implement, and extend ideas from recent AI research papers
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, comfortable working across distributed, cross-functional, and cross-cultural teams (Silicon Valley + HQ Korea)

Nice to have

• Research experience in autonomous driving, robotics, or embodied AI (e.g., perception, planning, control, or end-to-end driving models)
• Experience with world models, model-based reinforcement learning, or predictive/generative simulation
• Familiarity with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models or agentic AI architectures (reasoning, planning, memory, tool use)
• Publications at top-tier AI/ML/robotics venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, CoRL, RSS)
• Experience with large-scale distributed training and model optimization
• Prior experience contributing research to production systems or bringing prototypes to deployment
• Familiarity with simulation environments for autonomous driving (e.g., CARLA, nuPlan, Waymo Open Dataset)

Before you apply

• Application Review - Coding Test - 1st interview - 2nd interview - Offer Negotiation - Hiring

About the company

42dot is a mobility AI company committed to solving mobility challenges with software and AI. It is the Global Software Center of Hyundai Motor Group.