Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Foundation Model

XPENG is a leading smart technology company at the forefront of innovation, integrating advanced AI and autonomous driving technologies into its vehicles, including electric vehicles (EVs), electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, and robotics. With a strong focus on intelligent mobility, XPENG is dedicated to reshaping the future of transportation through cutting-edge R&D in AI, machine learning, and smart connectivity.

We are looking for a full-time Machine Learning Engineer / Research Scientist to drive the modeling and algorithmic development of XPENG's next-generation Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Foundation Model - the core brain that powers our end-to-end autonomous driving systems.

You will work closely with world-class researchers, perception and planning engineers, and infrastructure experts to design, train, and deploy large-scale multi-modal models that unify vision, language, and control. Your work will directly shape the intelligence that enables XPENG's future L3 / L4 autonomous driving products.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement large-scale multi-modal architectures (e.g., vision-language-action transformers) for end-to-end autonomous driving.
• Develop pretraining and fine-tuning strategies leveraging massive labeled and unlabeled fleet data (images, video, LiDAR, CAN bus, maps, human driving behaviors, etc.).
• 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.
• Collaborate with infrastructure engineers to scale training across thousands of GPUs using distributed training frameworks (FSDP, DDP, etc.).
• Conduct systematic ablation, evaluation, and visualization of model behavior across perception, reasoning, and planning tasks.
• Contribute to model deployment optimization , including quantization, export, and latency-accuracy trade-offs for onboard execution.

Minimum Qualifications

Preferred Qualifications

What do we provide :

The base salary range for this full-time position is $215,280-$364,320, in addition to bonus, equity and benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. It is our policy to provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified persons without regard to race, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, disability, veteran status or marital status or any other prescribed category set forth in federal or state regulations.