Research Scientist Intern
About The Position
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. About the Role We are actively seeking a full-time Research Scientist Intern 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.
Requirements
- Currently enrolled in the Master/Ph.D program in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or related field, with the specialization in the CV/NLP/ML.
- Experience in multi-modal modeling (vision, language, or planning), with deep understanding of representation learning, temporal modeling, and reinforcement learning techniques.
- Strong proficiency in PyTorch and modern transformer-based model design.
Nice To Haves
- Publication record in top-tier AI conferences (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, etc).
- Prior experience building foundation or end-to-end driving models, or LLM/VLM architectures (e.g., ViT, Flamingo, BEVFormer, RT-2, or GRPO-style policies).
- Knowledge of RLHF/DPO/GRPO, trajectory prediction, or policy learning for control tasks.
- Familiarity with distributed training (DDP, FSDP) and large-batch optimization.
Responsibilities
- Conduct research on designing and implementing large-scale multi-modal architectures (e.g., vision–language–action transformers) for end-to-end autonomous driving.
- Design and integrate cross-modal alignment (e.g., visual grounding, temporal reasoning, policy distillation, imitation and reinforcement learning) to improve model interpretability and action quality.
- Closely collaborate with researchers and engineers across the modeling and infrastructure team.
- Contribute to top-tier AI/CV/ML conferences publications and present research findings.
Benefits
- A collaborative, research-driven environment with access to massive real-world data and industry-scale compute.
- Opportunity to work with top-tier researchers and engineers advancing the frontier of foundation models for autonomous driving.
- Direct impact on the next generation of intelligent mobility systems.
- Comprehensive benefits, meals, and team-building activities.
- A fun, supportive and engaging environment
- Infrastructures and computational resources to support your work.
- Opportunity to work on cutting edge technologies with the top talents in the field.
- Opportunity to make significant impact on the transportation revolution by the means of advancing autonomous driving
- Competitive compensation package
- Snacks, lunches, dinners, and fun activities
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Intern
Education Level
Ph.D. or professional degree
