AI Autonomy Engineer

About the role

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, California, Archer is a leader in the next-gen aerospace sector building an end-to-end advanced air mobility platform that delivers air taxis, unmanned aircraft systems ("UAS"), aviation-related physical artificial intelligence ("AI") solutions, and other technologies to customers worldwide across the commercial aerospace and defense sectors.

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.

As the AI Autonomy Engineer, 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 aircraft perceive, reason, and navigate in the real world. Please note that we are currently hiring for Senior and Staff level positions.

What You'll Do

• Develop and integrate multi-model systems; VLN/VLA, perception, and language models.
• Design benchmarks, measure success and failure modes against internal baselines and published results, and report comparisons transparently.
• Fine-tune and adapt foundation models, weighing tradeoffs clearly at each step.
• 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.
• Take models from prototype to deployed, monitored components running on edge hardware under real latency and power constraints.

What You Need

• 8+ years of experience related to position minimum
• 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).
• Hands-on experience building, fine-tuning, and/or integrating vision-language or VLA models.
• Solid grasp of transformer architectures and multimodal foundation models, including the practical mechanics of fine-tuning a pre-trained checkpoint to a new domain.
• Strong with PyTorch (or comparable frameworks); comfortable owning model-serving integration end to end.
• Real 0->1 experience - you've built the first version of something, not just iterated on a mature product.
• Comfort with ambiguity. If you need a fully scoped program before you can start, this won't be a fit.

Bonus Qualifications

• VLN or embodied-agent navigation experience (aerial, ground, or indoor robotics).
• Experience with reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or self-supervised training for navigation or control.
• Edge deployment experience (NVIDIA Jetson-class or comparable) - measured and tuned inference latency and memory footprint.
• Shipped evaluation tooling or benchmarks that enable data-driven decisions.
• Experience in or alongside a safety-critical or regulated engineering process (aerospace, automotive, medical devices), even outside an ML-specific role.

Certain positions may be eligible for visa sponsorship.

Archer Aviation does not engage with external recruiting agencies/individual recruiters with whom it does not have a prior written agreement. Archer reserves the right to make use of any unsolicited resumes that it receives and bears no responsibility for payment of any fees asserted from the use of unsolicited resumes. If you are a recruiting agency or individual recruiter wishing to do business with Archer, please reach out to. All employment processes are managed by the Archer People Team.