Posted by the employer · Santa Clara, United States
Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Predictive World Model
XPENG · Santa Clara · United States
Posted: 8/12/2026 · 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.
Job Responsibilities:
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Research and develop predictive world models that learn how the physical world evolves, forecasting the future state of a scene from large-scale multimodal driving and robotics data.
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Develop high-quality multi-view future prediction and generation, supporting both action-conditioned rollouts and formulations that forecast the future without explicit action conditioning.
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Work at the boundary between world modeling and policy learning: develop architectures in which a shared backbone both predicts the future and produces trajectories or actions, and apply predictive pre-training to improve Vision-Language-Action (VLA) driving performance.
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Extend prediction beyond 2D pixel into a shared multimodal latent space that spans 3D scene representations such as Gaussian Splatting, together with occupancy and reward signals, so that a single model can support simulation, evaluation, and policy training.
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Advance cross-embodiment generalization: design unified observation and action representations, together with embodiment-conditioning mechanisms, so that a single world model transfers across vehicles, robots, and sensor configurations with only few-shot data.
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Define and build the evaluation methodology for predictive world models, spanning representation quality, prediction accuracy, generation fidelity, physical plausibility, long-horizon rollout consistency, and ultimately closed-loop policy performance, then feed the resulting models back into training as a source of synthetic data and corner-case simulation.
Minimum Skill Requirements:
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MS or PhD level education in Engineering or Computer Science with a focus on Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Generative Models, or a related field, or equivalent experience. Open to recent graduates.
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Strong experience in applied deep learning including model architecture design, large-scale model training, data curation, and empirical analysis.
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1-3 years + of experience working with DL frameworks such as PyTorch, including hands-on experience with distributed training (FSDP, DeepSpeed, or Megatron-style parallelism).
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Strong Python programming experience with software design skills.
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Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, code optimization and large-scale data processing.
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Excellent problem-solving skills, including the ability to design controlled experiments and draw sound conclusions from noisy training signals.
Preferred Skill Requirements:
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Hands on experience with generative models for video or 3D, such as diffusion, flow matching, autoregressive video prediction, or neural scene representations including NeRF and Gaussian Splatting.
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Experience with world models or learned simulators for decision making, including model-based reinforcement learning and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.
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Experience with multimodal foundation models and video tokenizers or VAEs, including pretraining or adapting large pretrained backbones.
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Experience with large-scale training infrastructure and performance optimization, such as mixed precision, torch.compile, kernel-level optimization, and multi-node scaling.
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A fun, supportive and engaging environment.
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Infrastructures and computational resources to support your work.
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Opportunity to work on cutting edge technologies with the top talents in the field.
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Opportunity to make a 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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