Staff/Lead Machine Learning Research Scientist, Behavior & Planning

The role

You will be a technical leader on the Behavior & Planning team. You will design, train, and productionize machine learning models to drive safe and natural driving behavior on real vehicles.

What you will do

• Lead ML initiatives across the autonomy stack from idea to on-road deployment.
• Design, train, and productionize state-of-the-art models.
• Build behavior and planning models that generalize to new cities and vehicle platforms.
• Partner with Perception, Simulation & Evaluation, and ML Infra & Data teams.
• Mentor engineers and researchers and help shape technical strategy.

Required qualifications

• 7+ years building and deploying machine learning systems.
• Track record of leading complex, multi-team technical initiatives.
• M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong, general machine learning foundations.
• Depth in sequential decision making, prediction, generative modeling, foundation/world models, or representation learning.
• Understanding of the full ML development cycle.
• Strong problem-solving and programming skills in Python and/or C++.
• Ability to lead initiatives and operate independently with minimal oversight.
• Efficient and clear communication skills.

Nice to have

• Prior experience in autonomous vehicles or robotics.
• Familiarity with how ML fits into a complete autonomy/planning stack.
• Experience mentoring engineers or leading a team.
• Familiarity with at least one major ML framework (PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow).
• Research contributions in top venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, RSS, CoRL).

Benefits

• Annual performance bonus
• Equity
• Competitive benefits package

About the company

Nuro is a physical AI company developing Level 4 autonomous driving technology. Founded in 2016, it is building a universal autonomy platform for various vehicles and use cases.