Staff, ML Engineer - Learned Behaviors / RL Planning
About The Position
At Torc, we have always believed that autonomous vehicle technology will transform how we travel, move freight, and do business. A leader in autonomous driving since 2007, Torc has spent over a decade commercializing our solutions with experienced partners. Now a part of the Daimler family, we are focused solely on developing software for automated trucks to transform how the world moves freight. Join us and catapult your career with the company that helped pioneer autonomous technology, and the first AV software company with the vision to partner directly with a truck manufacturer. Meet the Team: As a Staff Learned Behaviors Machine Learning Engineer, you will lead the development, deployment, and scaling of Reinforcement Learning - driven behavior models for autonomous trucks. You will collaborate across perception, prediction, planning, and safety teams to craft learned behavior modules that generalize across scenarios and drive safe, efficient, and human-like decision making in real-world operations. This is a technical leadership role focused on model innovation and maturity, not downstream feature integration.
Requirements
- 10+ years of professional experience (or equivalent) in applied machine learning in autonomous vehicles, robotics, simulation or a related domain.
- M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).
- Proven track record of designing and shipping learned behavior or policy models (e.g., behavior cloning, imitation learning, RL, multi-agent models) in production or near-production systems.
- Strong programming skills in the AI domain(Python, Pytorch (Lightning), pandas )
- Experience with open-source distributed computing framework, specifically Ray.
- Deep understanding of ML architectures (e.g., RNNs, transformers, graph neural networks, behavior prediction networks) and system-level integration into autonomy stacks.
- Experience with large-scale data pipelines, model training infrastructure, versioning, and deployment (cloud and/or embedded).
Nice To Haves
- Experience in trucking, highway autonomy, or heavy-vehicle behavior modeling.
- Expertise in Ray
- Experience integrating learned behavior modules into simulation and V&V workflows for autonomous systems.
- Familiarity with simulation frameworks, scenario libraries, and coverage of ODDs.
- Background in reinforcement learning in real-world or simulation, imitation learning of human drivers, or multi-agent modeling in vehicle contexts.
- Experience with sensor models, vehicle dynamics models, and domain adaptation from simulation to real world.
Responsibilities
- Lead architecture, development, and validation of learned behavior models (e.g., driver mimicry, multi-agent interaction, behavior cloning, reinforcement learning) for highway and freight-truck autonomy.
- Define and implement data strategies: collect, label, and curate large behavior datasets (in-vehicle, simulation, fleet logs) for training and evaluation.
- Develop scalable model training pipelines, infrastructure, and tooling to iterate quickly on behavior models, from prototype to production deployment.
- Design and track performance metrics, analyze model behavior, diagnose failure modes, and drive continuous improvement of learned behaviors in simulation and on-vehicle.
- Work with simulation, scenario, and validation teams to embed learned behavior models into verification and validation frameworks, ensuring coverage across operational design domains (ODDs).
- Mentor and lead mid and senior-level ML engineers, set technical direction, and drive best practices in learned behavior engineering across the team.
Benefits
- A competitive compensation package that includes a bonus component and stock options
- 100% paid medical, dental, and vision premiums for full-time employees
- 401K plan with a 6% employer match
- Flexibility in schedule and generous paid vacation (available immediately after start date)
- Company-wide holiday office closures
- AD+D and Life Insurance
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Number of Employees
501-1,000 employees
