Vision Language Action Models

Qualcomm•San Diego, CA

6d•$211,900 - $317,900

About The Position

Qualcomm’s Autonomous Driving team is defining the future of safe, intelligent transportation. We are seeking an AI Lead, Autonomous Driving to lead the design and development of our next generation E2E Driving models (VLA, World model based,...) for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). AI systems that enable vehicles to perceive, reason, and act in complex real-world driving scenarios. This role combines cutting edge research with practical deployment on Qualcomm’s advanced automotive-grade AI platforms.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 8+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience.
Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 7+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience.
PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 6+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or related field (PhD preferred).
Strong experience in deep learning, autonomous driving stacks (transformers, VLMs, multimodal models) and autonomous driving AI system deployments.
Proficiency in Python and frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
Proven experience in system design and integration across complex AI stacks.
Experience deploying AI systems on embedded/edge platforms with real-time constraints.
Strong understanding of automotive software stacks, simulation environments, and validation workflows.
Background in vision-language models, policy learning, or autonomous driving foundation models.
Experience with autonomous driving dataset curation, sensor simulation, or sim‑to‑real transfer.
Knowledge of model compression techniques (quantization, distillation) for efficient deployment.
Strong communication skills and ability to work in a collaborative, fast‑paced environment.

Responsibilities

Research the latest trends in autonomous driving AI, End-to-End stack, World Models and VLA model development to inform Qualcomm’s autonomous driving roadmap.
Design and develop e2e Driving Models for ADAS and autonomous driving applications.
Build and maintain training pipelines, datasets, and evaluation benchmarks for autonomous driving AI.
Establish metrics, evaluation frameworks, and simulation strategies for robust system validation (real-world + simulation).
Optimize models for real-time, on-device performance on Qualcomm automotive platforms (edge AI deployment, acceleration, efficiency).
Collaborate with cross-functional teams across software, hardware, product, and partner ecosystems to deliver production-grade systems.
Mentor engineers and contribute to building a high-performing AI systems team.