Senior/staff Machine Learning Research Scientist: Generative Modeling for Planning

Nuro Nuro · Robotics · CA · Autonomy

Research Scientist focused on developing and productizing state-of-the-art generative models (diffusion, flow matching, energy-based) for autonomous driving plan generation, leveraging foundation models and reinforcement learning for optimization and controllable generation.

What you'd actually do

  1. Develop and scale state-of-the-art generative models—especially diffusion architectures, flow-matching techniques, and energy-based models —for autonomous plan generation.
  2. Build generative models with foundation models. Leverage large language models and world foundation models for reasoning, decision making and multi-modality generation.
  3. Optimize generative models using reinforcement learning to improve interactive reasoning. Explore reward modeling/learned verifier using generative models. Explore joint prediction and planning and self-play. Leverage generative models for active learning and world modeling.
  4. Develop controllable generative models to guide the generation process towards desired goals, conditions and rewards.
  5. Collaborate across autonomy teams while developing holistic solutions to top autonomy challenges. Understand issues, propose ideas, prioritize work and develop solutions to solve them, evaluate your solution by deploying the models on to the NuroDriver.

Skills

Required

  • Python
  • C++
  • Generative models
  • Diffusion models
  • Flow matching
  • Energy-based models
  • Autonomous driving
  • Robotics

Nice to have

  • LLMs
  • World foundation models
  • Reinforcement learning
  • Reward modeling
  • Vision-language-action models
  • Video generation
  • Text-to-image generation
  • Diffusion models for LLMs
  • Self-play
  • Active learning
  • World modeling

What the JD emphasized

  • Ph.D. (preferable) or M.Sc. with 3+ years of experience working with generative models
  • Demonstrated research publications in top conferences (e.g. NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, RSS, CoRL etc.)

Other signals

  • Generative models for autonomous driving
  • Diffusion models, flow matching, energy-based models
  • Reinforcement learning for optimization
  • Productizing models for real-world deployment