Senior Research Scientist - Autonomous Vehicles

NVIDIA is recruiting top Senior Research Scientists for Autonomous Vehicle Research. AI-powered autonomous vehicles that can learn, reason, and interact with people are no longer science fiction. Self-driving cars, autonomous delivery vehicles, and autonomous construction vehicles are getting increasingly close to widespread deployment. However, fundamental research questions still need to be addressed for full vehicle autonomy, such as:

• Enabling novel training paradigms that leverage simulation to train AV policies in closed-loop.
• Equipping autonomous vehicles with online and offline assurances that meet safety-critical system standards.
• Ensuring autonomous vehicles work seamlessly in new places.

The NVIDIA Autonomous Vehicle Research group brings together a diverse, interdisciplinary team working on core topics in vehicle autonomy, including agent behavior models, end-to-end AV architectures, AI safety, closed-loop training approaches, and AV foundation models (VLMs, reasoning models, etc.). The focus is on basic and applied research; team members are encouraged to publish their work, open-source code, and deploy technology within production systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement cutting-edge techniques in vehicle autonomy.
• Publish and present original research at conferences and events.
• Collaborate with research team members, internal product teams, and external researchers.
• Transfer and/or open-source developed technology to relevant product groups.
• Collaborate closely with product teams to integrate research results into high-end, production-level systems.

Requirements

• Ph.D. in Computer Science/Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
• 6+ years of relevant research experience in vehicle/robot autonomy.
• Strong knowledge of theory and practice of vehicle/robot autonomy, or a related area with a keen interest in autonomous vehicles.
• Track record of research excellence with publications in top conferences and journals (e.g., RSS, ICRA, IJRR, NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, TAC) and research artifacts such as software projects.
• Excellent collaboration and interpersonal skills.
• Exceptional programming skills in Python; proficiency in C++ and parallel programming (e.g., CUDA).
• Solid understanding of common machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work in a dynamic, research-focused team.

Pay

Base salary range is $192,000 - $304,750 USD for Level 4, and $224,000 - $356,500 USD for Level 5. Eligible for equity and benefits.