Senior/ Staff ML Research Scientist, Retrieval & Search

Who We Are

Nuro exists to better everyday life through robotics. Founded in 2016, Nuro is a leading autonomous technology company with vehicles on road today in California and Texas. The company’s core technology is the Nuro Driver, an integrated autonomous driving system consisting of state-of-the-art, AI-first software and custom-built sense and compute hardware. The first commercial application of the Nuro Driver is autonomous goods delivery with our custom, electric, zero-occupant vehicles in partnership with some of the most recognized brands in the world including Uber and FedEx.

About the Role

The mandate of the Learned Behavior team is to use advanced machine learning techniques to accelerate software progress. In this role, you will be working as a member of the Learned Behavior team and leveraging the cutting edge of machine learning research to solve practical, real-world, challenging problems. You will drive the development and optimization of the embedding models that are central to our behavior models’ data flywheel. Your expertise will enhance our scene retrieval and search capabilities, which are crucial for the continuous improvement cycle of our autonomy stack. Additionally, you will contribute directly to the robustness and effectiveness of all our core behavior models, including prediction, planning, foundation models, LLMs, and VLMs. If you love solving challenging new problems with a mindset of deriving practical solutions to eventually be used on the vehicle, come join us!

About the Work

• Research and develop advanced machine learning and search techniques for semantic/natural language and similarity based search that can operate over huge driving data corpuses for effective scene search and retrieval.
• Explore and apply advanced deep retrieval techniques to construct and maintain versatile datasets and knowledge bases, supporting a wide range of applications from model training and evaluation to online decision-making in our autonomous driving systems.
• Work as a part of an autonomy team to build effective and efficient ML data pipelines and processes.
• Experiment quickly and fail fast, develop and leverage state-of-the-art ML models and techniques, and publish blog posts and/or papers highlighting successes.
• Collaborate with data collection and infrastructure teams to deploy these search methodologies into production.
• Develop practical ML solutions, deploy models to the NuroDriver, and witness their real-world impact on the road.

About You

You have deep expertise and prior experience in some or many of the following areas:

• You have 4+ years of experience working with machine learning using deep networks and large volumes of data.
• You have subject matter expertise and research in one or more of the following areas: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Robotics (bonus), and have some familiarity with the state of the art in ML for autonomous driving and data utilization (bonus).
• You have an expertise in the following domains: 
  • Deep retrieval: DPR, RAG, CLIP, etc.
  • Metric learning, representation learning, contrastive learning
  • (Bonus) Search & retrieval infra: vector databases, search indices 
• You have strong problem-solving and programming skills in C++ and Python
• Strong culture fit and good team player
• You have an M.Sc. or Ph.D. focusing on one or more of the following areas: Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, or a closely related field
• Demonstrated research publications in any of the major conferences is a bonus (CVPR, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, ICCV, AAAI, etc.)

At Nuro, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. For this position, the reasonably expected pay range is between $202,350 and $303,050/year for the level at which this job has been scoped. Your base pay will depend on several factors, including your experience, qualifications, education, location, and skills. In the event that you are considered for a different level, a higher or lower pay range would apply. This position is also eligible for an annual performance bonus, equity, and a competitive benefits package.

At Nuro, we celebrate differences and are committed to a diverse workplace that fosters inclusion and psychological safety for all employees. Nuro is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and expressly prohibits any form of workplace discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristics.