Staff Engineer, AI Autonomy

About the company

Archer Aviation develops electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) aircraft and related AI-enabled operational technologies for urban air taxi networks.

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Archer is an aerospace company based in San Jose, California building an all-electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft with a mission to advance the benefits of sustainable air mobility. We are designing, manufacturing, and operating an all-electric aircraft that can carry four passengers while producing minimal noise.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our sights are set high and our problems are hard, and we believe that diversity in the workplace is what makes us smarter, drives better insights, and will ultimately lift us all to success. We are dedicated to cultivating an equitable and inclusive environment that embraces our differences, and supports and celebrates all of our team members.</span></p></div><p style="line-height: 1.4;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);">As the Staff Engineer, AI Autonomy, you'll be at the forefront of bringing intelligent, learned behavior to real aircraft — building and deploying the vision-language and VLA models that let Archer's eVTOL aircraft, including Midnight, perceive, reason, and navigate in the real world.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 1.5;">&nbsp;</p> <p style="line-height: 1.5;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);"><strong>What You’ll Do:</strong></span></p> <ul class="p-rich_text_list p-rich_text_list__bullet p-rich_text_list--nested" data-stringify-type="unordered-list" data-list-tree="true" data-indent="0" data-border="0"> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);" data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);">Develop and integrate multi-model systems; VLN/VLA, perception, and language models.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);" data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);">Design benchmarks, measure success and failure modes against internal baselines and published results, and report comparisons transparently.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);" data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);">Fine-tune and adapt foundation models, weighing tradeoffs clearly at each step.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);" data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);">Validate through data-driven testing in simulation, on hardware, and in flight test, partnering closely with the Safety and Simulation Engineers who check your model's output.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);" data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);">Take models from prototype to deployed, monitored components running on edge hardware under real latency and power constraints.</span></li> </ul> <div class="p-rich_text_section" style="line-height: 1.5;">&nbsp;</div> <div class="p-rich_text_section" style="line-height: 1.5;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);"><strong>What You Need:</strong></span></div> <div class="p-rich_text_section" style="line-height: 1.5;"> <ul class="p-rich_text_list p-rich_text_list__bullet p-rich_text_list--nested" data-stringify-type="unordered-list" data-list-tree="true" data-indent="0" data-border="0"> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);" data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><span style="color: rgb(38, 38, 38);">8+ years of experience related to position minimum</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);" data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);">M.S., PhD, or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field, with strong applied machine learning depth (exceptional BS candidates also considered).</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);" data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);">Hands-on experience building, fine-tuning, and/or integrating vision-language or VLA models.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);" data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);">Solid grasp of transformer architectures and multimodal foundation models, including the practical mechanics of fine-tuning a pre-trained checkpoint to a new domain.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);" data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);">Strong with PyTorch (or comparable frameworks); comfortable owning model-serving integration end to end.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);" data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><span style="font-