Machine Learning Research Scientist, Active/Human Feedback Learning

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. In this role, you will focus on developing and implementing innovative strategies in active learning, deep retrieval, or human-in-the-loop learning to enhance the effectiveness and adaptability of our core behavior ML models for prediction and planning. Your contributions will play a crucial role in optimizing our data utilization, model performance, and decision-making processes for real-world autonomous driving applications. 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

• Develop and implement innovative active learning strategies to select and utilize training data, enhancing the effectiveness, robustness, and adaptability of our core behavior ML models in prediction and planning.
• 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.
• Design and execute human-in-the-loop learning approaches, including on-policy and off-policy data collection, to refine and improve the decision-making capabilities of our autonomous vehicles.
• Work as a part of an autonomy team to build effective and efficient ML data pipelines and processes.
• Experiment quickly and fail fast while leveraging state-of-the-art ML models and techniques.
• Work with data collection and labeling teams to set a high quality bar for incoming data
• 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 1+ 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 at least one of the following domains:
  • Active learning, curriculum learning
  • On-policy / off-policy data collection in robotics: DAgger, Human preference, etc.
  • Deep retrieval: DPR, RAG, contrastive learning, etc.
  • Model uncertainty, density estimation, adversarial robustness
• 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 (RSS, ICRA, CoRL, 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 $167,200 and $250,800/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.