AI/ML Engineer - Model Inference

Cola is part of GM’s autonomous vehicle effort, focused on helping teams discover, understand, and curate high-value data from large-scale real-world sensor streams. The team sits at the intersection of machine learning, data infrastructure, and developer productivity, building systems that make it easier to search for important scenarios, prepare training-ready data, and support fast iteration across perception and evaluation workflows.

Our goal is to make world understanding scalable, practical, and cost efficient for embodied AI systems. We believe the next generation of autonomy and robotics depends not only on stronger models, but also on better infrastructure for turning massive volumes of multimodal data into reusable signals, searchable artifacts, and high-quality evaluation loops. That means building systems that can operate at industrial scale while preserving the flexibility to adapt quickly to new questions, new edge cases, and new model capabilities.

A core idea behind how we work is EMWU, or Efficient Multi-Tier World Understanding. At a high level, EMWU is a cost-aware approach that first performs the cheapest reusable work, such as detection, featurization, and retrieval, and then applies deeper reasoning only where it adds meaningful value. This operating model reflects how Cola engineers think: build durable intermediate artifacts, design for scale from the start, and balance quality, speed, and cost instead of optimizing any one of them in isolation.

We are looking for a hands-on machine learning engineer to help build the data processing, featurization, and inference foundations that power scalable world understanding. This role is ideal for someone who is equally comfortable working on machine learning systems, production infrastructure, and evaluation loops, and who enjoys turning ambiguous problems into practical, reliable solutions.

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  Design, build, and productionize data processing and featurization pipelines for large-scale multimodal data

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  Improve inference frameworks for computer vision and multimodal models, with a focus on reliability, extensibility, and operational simplicity

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  Drive scalability and cost efficiency across the end-to-end pipeline, including compute utilization, throughput, storage, and query performance

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  Work closely with partners across machine learning, infrastructure, and evaluation to deliver systems that support both rapid experimentation and production use

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  Develop and refine evaluation methods for model quality, retrieval quality, and system-level performance

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  Help shape technical direction through strong execution, thoughtful tradeoff analysis, and clear engineering judgment

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  Take ownership of ambiguous problem spaces, define practical paths forward, and move quickly from prototype to production

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  Operate with urgency and a strong bias toward execution velocity while maintaining a high bar for engineering quality

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience

• Experience building production data processing or machine learning pipelines at scale

• Experience with featurization, embedding, inference, or retrieval systems for vision or multimodal workloads

• Strong understanding of computer vision models and the practical challenges of deploying them in production environments

• Experience evaluating machine learning systems using clear metrics, experiments, and regression safeguards

• Proven ability to work hands-on in fast-moving environments with incomplete information

• Strong ownership mindset, sound technical judgment, and the ability to drive execution through ambiguity

• Experience with world models or large-scale world understanding systems

• Experience with simulation workflows or synthetic data systems

• Experience with vector search, approximate nearest neighbor retrieval, or large-scale embedding infrastructure

• Experience working on embodied AI, autonomous systems, or safety-critical machine learning applications

Our vision is a world with Zero Crashes, Zero Emissions and Zero Congestion and we embrace the responsibility to lead the change that will make our world better, safer and more equitable for all.

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We encourage interested candidates to review the key responsibilities and qualifications for each role and apply for any positions that match their skills and capabilities. Applicants in the recruitment process may be required, where applicable, to successfully complete a role-related assessment(s) and/or a pre-employment screening prior to beginning employment. To learn more, visit How we Hire.

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