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Machine Learning Engineer

Avride

Salary undisclosed

Austin, TexasOn-site

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Description

About the role

We're hiring an experienced ML engineer to work on the models that see. You'll own problems end to end: deciding what data you need, getting it, training on it, proving the result is actually better, and getting it running inside the vehicle's constraints.

The problems you'd be working on

Rather than a list of responsibilities, here's what the team is actually chewing on:

A model that's two points better offline can be worse on the road. Aggregate benchmark numbers hide the failures that matter — the rare scene, the unusual agent, the bad lighting. Building evaluation that predicts on-road behaviour, and knowing when to distrust your own metric, is a bigger part of this job than architecture search.

We generate far more data than anyone can look at. The interesting frames are a vanishingly small fraction of what the fleet records. Finding them, deciding what's worth labelling, and keeping the training set honest as the distribution shifts is continuous work, not a one-time setup.

The vehicle's compute budget is fixed and already full. Everything you add competes with everything already running. You'll be making concrete trades between accuracy, latency, and memory, and defending them.

Modern architectures keep changing what's possible. Transformers and multimodal models opened up approaches that weren't available two years ago. Part of the job is reading what's coming out, judging honestly whether it applies to our problem, and being willing to conclude that it doesn't.

Nothing ships alone. Your model's output is someone else's input. You'll work directly with the planning, infrastructure, and vehicle software teams, and the handoffs are where most of the real difficulty lives.

What we're looking for

  • You've shipped a neural network, not just trained one. At least three years taking models from data collection through training to something that ran in production or on real hardware, and stayed working.
  • Real depth in one modern ML area — computer vision, large language models, or generative modelling. We'd rather see one domain you know properly than six you've touched.
  • Python and a modern deep learning framework, fluently, as your daily working environment.
  • Enough C++ to be useful. Inference runs in C++ on the vehicle. You don't need to be a C++ specialist, but you need to be able to read the code your model runs inside and work with the engineers who own it.
  • Comfort with large-scale data tooling and SQL — you can get your own data without waiting on someone else.
  • You read papers and can tell which ones matter. Most don't.
  • You can explain a technical trade-off to someone who doesn't share your background and hold your position when it's the right call.

Things that would stand out

  • You've made a model meaningfully faster on target hardware and can explain what you gave up to get there.
  • You've worked on ML for autonomous vehicles or robotics before, and know how different the failure modes are from a benchmark.
  • Published work or open-source contributions we can actually read — send us a link and we'll read it.
  • A track record of setting a direction and following it through without needing to be steered.

 

 

Candidates are required to be authorized to work in the U.S. The employer is not offering relocation, sponsorship, and remote work options are not available.

Avride is an equal opportunity employer and committed to providing reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees with disabilities to ensure they have equal access to employment opportunities. Avride complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), if you need a reasonable accommodation to assist with the application or hiring process, or to perform the essential functions of a job, please email jobs@avride.ai.

About this role

Avride is building perception models for autonomous vehicles, and this role puts you in charge of the full lifecycle: from deciding what data matters in a massive fleet dataset, through training and evaluation, to shipping inference code that runs on the vehicle's fixed compute budget. You'll own the hard problems—not just making models accurate on benchmarks, but making them work reliably on the road, where rare scenes and unusual conditions break what looked good offline. The real challenge is knowing when your metrics are lying to you and making honest trade-offs between accuracy, latency, and memory when everything is already competing for space.

You'll need at least three years shipping neural networks to production or real hardware, with genuine depth in computer vision, LLMs, or generative modelling—not a surface familiarity with many areas. Fluency in Python and a modern deep learning framework is table stakes. You also need enough C++ to read and work with the inference code running on the vehicle itself, and comfort pulling your own data from large-scale systems using SQL. The role demands someone who reads papers critically, can explain technical trade-offs to non-specialists, and has the judgment to conclude that a new architecture simply doesn't apply to your problem.

Experience optimizing models for actual hardware, prior work in autonomous vehicles or robotics, or published work you can point to would set you apart. This is in-office in Austin with no remote option or relocation support, and you'll work directly with planning, infrastructure, and vehicle software teams—the handoffs between your model and their systems are where most of the difficulty lives.

How this employer is doing

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Typical pay for this role

$140,000

Typical range: $120,000 to $140,000

This role's local market on JobMinglr

Pay for this role

The employer didn't post a pay range for this role. That usually means pay is set in negotiation, which favors whoever arrives with numbers. Check ranges on comparable Machine Learning Engineer postings in Austin, and analyze any offer before you accept it.

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