Posted by the employer · Santa Clara, United States
Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Foundation Model
XPENG · Santa Clara · United States
Posted: 1/15/2025 · On the employer's job feed since 10/11/2026
The advert
Quoted in full from XPENG's job posting. Gavroche does not edit it.
Key Responsibilities
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Design and implement large-scale multi-modal architectures (e.g., vision–language–action transformers) for end-to-end autonomous driving.
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Develop pretraining and fine-tuning strategies leveraging massive labeled and unlabeled fleet data (images, video, LiDAR, CAN bus, maps, human driving behaviors, etc.).
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Research and integrate cross-modal alignment (e.g., visual grounding, temporal reasoning, policy distillation, imitation and reinforcement learning) to improve model interpretability and action quality.
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Collaborate with infrastructure engineers to scale training across thousands of GPUs using distributed training frameworks (FSDP, DDP, etc.).
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Conduct systematic ablation, evaluation, and visualization of model behavior across perception, reasoning, and planning tasks.
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Contribute to model deployment optimization, including quantization, export, and latency–accuracy trade-offs for onboard execution.
Minimum Qualifications
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Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or related field, with 3+ years of experience in deep learning research or productization.
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Strong proficiency in PyTorch and modern transformer-based model design.
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Experience in large-scale pretraining or multi-modal modeling (vision, language, or planning).
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Deep understanding of representation learning, temporal modeling, and self-supervised or reinforcement learning techniques.
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Familiarity with distributed training (DDP, FSDP) and large-batch optimization.
Preferred Qualifications
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PhD in CS/CE/EE or related field, with 1+ years of relevant industry experience.
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Publication record in top-tier AI conferences (CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ECCV).
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Prior experience building foundation or end-to-end driving models, or LLM/VLM architectures (e.g., ViT, Flamingo, BEVFormer, RT-2, or GRPO-style policies).
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Familiarity with RLHF/DPO/GRPO, trajectory prediction, or policy learning for control tasks.
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Proven ability to collaborate cross-functionally with infra, perception, and planning teams to deliver production-ready models.
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A collaborative, research-driven environment with access to massive real-world data and industry-scale compute.
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An opportunity to work with top-tier researchers and engineers advancing the frontier of foundation models for autonomous driving.
- Direct impact on the next generation of intelligent mobility systems.
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Opportunity to make significant impact on the transportation revolution by the means of advancing autonomous driving.
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Competitive compensation package.
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Snacks, lunches, dinners, and fun activities.
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