AI Research Engineer, VLM, Autonomy & Robotics

State-of-the-art Vision Language Models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet they still struggle with physical reasoning and real-world understanding—often due to a “text first, vision second” training paradigm and insufficient large-scale, diverse, real-world datasets. By leveraging Tesla’s extensive global vehicle fleet and our rapidly growing humanoid robot platforms, we aim to reshape how VLMs perceive and interpret the physical world. In this role, you’ll have access to unparalleled compute resources, massive multimodal real-world datasets, and close collaboration with a small team of world-class AI research engineers. You’ll be involved in every stage of the VLM pipeline—pre-training, alignment, post-training, reinforcement learning, evaluation, distillation, deployment, and efficient inference—pushing the boundaries of vision-language integration for real-world applications. Job posting details for AI Research Engineer, VLM, Autonomy & Robotics at Tesla in Palo Alto, California. Compensation / salary range: $124,000 - $420,000/annual salary + cash and stock awards + benefitsPay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. ClimateTechList gathers 10,000+ job openings from over 615 climate tech companies and updates them daily.