Archer is an aerospace company based in San Jose, California building an all-electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft with a mission to advance the benefits of sustainable air mobility. We are designing, manufacturing, and operating an all-electric aircraft that can carry four passengers while producing minimal noise.
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 Staff Engineer, AI Autonomy, 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 eVTOL aircraft, including Midnight, perceive, reason, and navigate in the real world.
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.
- 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.
At Archer we aim to attract, retain, and motivate talent that possess the skills and leadership necessary to grow our business. We drive a pay-for-performance culture and reward performance that supports the Company’s business strategy. For this position we are targeting a base pay between $195,00.00 - $235,000.00 . Actual compensation offered will be determined by factors such as job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
Skills Required
- 8+ years experience as an AI Autonomy engineer
- M.S., PhD, or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Robotics, or related field (exceptional BS considered)
- Hands-on experience building, fine-tuning, and/or integrating vision-language or VLA models
- Solid grasp of transformer architectures and multimodal foundation models
- Strong with PyTorch or comparable frameworks and ownership of model-serving integration end-to-end
- Real 0->1 product development experience (built first version of something)
- Comfort working with ambiguity and undefined scope
- 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) with measured/tuned inference latency and memory footprint
- Shipped evaluation tooling or benchmarks enabling data-driven decisions
- Experience in or alongside safety-critical or regulated engineering processes (aerospace, automotive, medical devices)
Archer Aviation Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Archer Aviation and has not been reviewed or approved by Archer Aviation.
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Healthcare Strength — Health coverage includes medical, dental, and vision, alongside HSA/FSA options and an Employee Assistance Program, forming a comprehensive base. Wellness activities and company-sponsored outings are additionally referenced.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time off includes generous PTO, paid sick days, and paid holidays, with unlimited PTO noted for exempt employees. This breadth provides above-average flexibility for a hardware-focused environment.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Ownership opportunities include company equity, performance bonuses, and an Employee Stock Purchase Plan with a purchase discount. Equity is used to keep packages competitive in high-demand roles, creating meaningful upside potential.
Archer Aviation Insights
What We Do
Archer is an aerospace company building an all-electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft focused on improving mobility in cities. The company's mission is to advance the benefits of sustainable air mobility. Archer is designing, manufacturing, and operating a fully electric aircraft that can carry four passengers for 60 miles at speeds of up to 150mph while producing minimal noise. Archer's team is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
