Principal AI Research Engineer

Position Overview

Archer is an aerospace company based in San Jose, California, designing, manufacturing, and operating all‐electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that carry up to four passengers with minimal noise. As a Principal AI Research Engineer, you will lead advanced AI/ML research efforts that directly shape the future of autonomous and intelligent systems in aerospace. You will work with engineering, product, and research teams to define strategy, push the limits of AI innovation, and transition research into production-ready solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Setting research vision and driving technical strategy in AI/ML for Generative AI and Deep Learning in the aviation domain.
• Designing, implementing, and evaluating novel machine learning and deep learning algorithms at scale.
• Leading development of AI models from data acquisition and preprocessing through training, architecture design, evaluation, and deployment.
• Guiding teams in translating academic breakthroughs into validated, real-world solutions.
• Conducting experiments to benchmark techniques, assess robustness, and evaluate performance under operational constraints.
• Building scalable, reproducible, and efficient research tools, pipelines, and frameworks.
• Mentoring research engineers and fostering a culture of technical excellence and innovation.
• Staying at the forefront of AI/ML research, identifying trends, and strategically applying them to Archer’s technology roadmap.

Required Qualifications

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field with a strong emphasis on AI/ML.
• 10+ years of AI/ML research and development experience with a proven track record of delivering impactful solutions.
• Exceptional proficiency with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Deep expertise in transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, multimodal foundation models, diffusion policies, model fine-tuning, distillation, and mixture of experts.
• Strong ability to define AI model requirements, debug complex systems, and optimize training and evaluation processes.
• Up-to-date knowledge of the latest AI/ML techniques, methodologies, and literature.
• Experience driving research from concept to production in high-stakes or safety-critical applications.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including version control, testing, and code quality.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with reinforcement learning, self-supervised training, and imitation learning.
• Expertise in developing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotics, manipulation, or mobility.
• Demonstrated success in scaling AI solutions to production environments.
• Publications at top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICRA, CVPR, or ACL.
• Contributions to open-source AI/ML projects.

Benefits & Perks

• Compensation: Target base pay between $238,080.00 - $297,600.00, determined by relevant experience and skills.
• Pay-for-performance culture aimed at rewarding impactful contributions.
• Inclusive and equitable work environment that celebrates diversity.
• Commitment to providing reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities or sincerely held religious beliefs.