Senior, ML Engineer - VLM

About the Company At Torc, we have always believed that autonomous vehicle technology will transform how we travel, move freight, and do business. A leader in autonomous driving since 2007, Torc has spent over a decade commercializing our solutions with experienced partners. Now a part of the Daimler family, we are focused solely on developing software for automated trucks to transform how the world moves freight. Join us and catapult your career with the company that helped pioneer autonomous technology, and the first AV software company with the vision to partner directly with a truck manufacturer. Meet The Team Torc is marching toward its AV 3.0 strategy, where end-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models perceive, reason, and act directly from sensor data. High-quality, semantically rich training data is the single biggest lever for that strategy, and this team owns it. Sitting within Offline Perception, this team turns petabytes of logged multi-modal fleet data (images, kinematics) into VLM/VLA-ready datasets: geometric annotations, scenario-level semantic descriptions, action- and trajectory-grounded labels, and reasoning traces that explain why a maneuver was taken. We run a continuous data flywheel — mine long-tail and failure cases, auto-label at scale, validate quality, and feed curated datasets directly into Torc’s end-to-end VLM/VLA model development. You will own the dataset layer that those models learn from. What You’ll Do • Own the offline dataset pipeline — design, implement, test, and deploy Cloud-based pipelines that convert logged multi-sensor data into VLM/VLA training datasets, spanning geometric labels (3D/2D detection, tracking, segmentation, depth) through semantic, scenario-level, and action/trajectory-grounded annotations. • Build VLM-assisted auto-labeling — develop open-vocabulary detection, dense captioning, semantic enrichment, and scene/scenario description generation that move beyond closed-set bounding boxes, using foundation models to scale annotation and cut manual labeling cost. • Generate reasoning-grounded labels — produce language-grounded reasoning and chain-of-causation style annotations, temporally aligned to ego-motion and trajectories, to support VLA training and explainable driving behavior. • Mine and curate the long tail — surface rare, difficult, and high-uncertainty scenarios, and build curated datasets that measurably improve downstream VLM/VLA model metrics rather than simply adding volume. • Close the data flywheel — define dataset schemas, quality metrics, and validation; track auto-labeling quality against model requirements; route model failures back into re-labeling and retraining loops. • Partner with the end-to-end model team — co-define dataset specifications with VLM/VLA model developers, own the quality bar and delivery cadence, and operationalize a continuous dataset delivery loop into their training pipelines. • Scale on cloud infrastructure — build distributed, reproducible pipelines using columnar data formats and distributed compute, with disciplined software practices, version control, and documentation. • Lead and mentor — serve as project lead, guide less-experienced engineers, run design reviews, set coding and annotation standards, and drive alignment across team interfaces to the rest of the organization. • Stay current — track the latest advances in multimodal models, auto-labeling, and end-to-end autonomous driving, and translate relevant research into production data systems. What You’ll Need to Succeed: • Considered highly skilled and proficient in discipline ; conducts complex, important work under minimal supervision and with wide latitude for independent judgment. • Scope of Influence: Expected to drive alignment across team interfa