Machine Learning Engineer

Build real-time, agentic machine learning systems for Tesla’s Digital Optimus Gaming Track, spanning long-horizon reasoning, video understanding, and multi-agent collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Design and take ownership of experiments to improve long-horizon agentic gameplay, emphasizing memory and real-time control
• Lead or contribute to core work on large-scale training runs, including data mixture, scaling, infrastructure, and algorithms
• Enhance the post-training pipeline with scalable environments, rewards, and behavior evaluations
• Develop architectures for efficient context management, real-time reactivity, and intelligent planning that can complete tasks over many days
• Create rigorous benchmarks and evaluation techniques to measure agent performance in games and transfer across games, embodiments, and general computer use
• Collaborate across research, infrastructure, and production teams to integrate agent systems into Full Self-Driving (FSD) and physical Optimus
• Rapidly iterate on prototypes, debug complex multimodal ML stacks, and contribute to new research directions

Requirements

• Strong technical understanding across the full model development lifecycle, from pre-training to inference
• Demonstrated contributions to at least one large multimodal training run
• Experience with planning and/or memory architectures for long-horizon or agentic systems
• Proven record delivering work from ideation to publication and/or production
• Hands-on experience with VLMs, VLAs, RL, and large-scale transformers
• Motivation to ship models that solve difficult, high-bar problems

Technologies

• VLMs
• VLAs
• RL
• Large-scale transformers

Benefits

• Medical plans (options with $0 payroll deduction)
• Family-building, fertility, adoption, and surrogacy benefits
• Dental (including orthodontic coverage) and vision plans (options with $0 paycheck contribution)
• Company Paid Health Savings Account (HSA) contribution when enrolled in the High-Deductible medical plan with HSA
• Healthcare and Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
• 401(k) with employer match, Employee Stock Purchase Plans, and other financial benefits
• Company paid Basic Life and AD&D
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance (90 day waiting period)
• Employee Assistance Program
• Sick and Vacation time (Flex time for salary positions, Accrued hours for Hourly positions) and Paid Holidays
• Back-up childcare and parenting support resources
• Voluntary benefits: critical illness, hospital indemnity, accident insurance, theft & legal services, and pet insurance
• Weight Loss and Tobacco Cessation Programs
• Tesla Babies program
• Commuter benefits
• Employee discounts and perks program

What to Expect

• Develop real-time agents on the Digital Optimus Gaming Track that operate computers at superhuman levels
• Train models to browse the web, use professional apps, and play AAA games
• Work spans reasoning/planning, video understanding, and multi-agent collaboration with impact across Tesla’s robotics and autonomy ecosystem
• Join a small group of engineers to build novel architectures, own large training runs, and deliver frontier research

Expected Compensation

• $124,000 - $420,000 per year salary + cash and stock awards + benefits
• Pay offered may vary based on market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience
• Total compensation may include other elements depending on the position offered; details provided if an offer is extended

Location: Palo Alto, CA (onsite)