Staff Autonomous System Test Engineer - VLA

XPENG is a leading smart technology company at the forefront of innovation, integrating advanced AI and autonomous driving technologies into its vehicles, including electric vehicles (EVs), electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, and robotics. With a strong focus on intelligent mobility, XPENG is dedicated to reshaping the future of transportation through cutting-edge R&D in AI, machine learning, and smart connectivity.

We are looking for a detail-oriented and highly analytical Autonomous System Test Engineer to help validate and improve next-generation VLA autonomous driving systems. In this role, you will work closely with Machine Learning Engineers (MLEs), simulation teams, and vehicle testing teams to ensure new VLA capabilities are robust, reliable, and production-ready.

You will play a critical role in shaping the quality of autonomous driving features through systematic testing, scenario design, simulation validation, and real-world vehicle testing. This role requires strong systems thinking, hands-on debugging capability, and a deep understanding of autonomous driving behavior and ML-based systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner closely with MLEs to understand newly developed features and define customized validation plans for both simulation and vehicle testing.

• Triage, track, and root-cause autonomous driving issues across simulation and road testing environments.

• Categorize issues by feature area, regression source, severity, and potential ownership to accelerate debugging and iteration cycles.

• Distill complex system behaviors into actionable insights and provide clear debugging directions for MLEs and cross-functional teams.

• Identify patterns and potential root causes behind failures, regressions, or unstable driving behaviors.

• Continuously adapt testing plans based on daily feature development progress to ensure sufficient validation exposure for new capabilities and prevent regression of existing capabilities.

• Work closely with vehicle testing teams to coordinate and influence on-road testing plans, minimizing environmental noise and improving test consistency.

• Collect, analyze, and customize driving scenarios into scalable simulation test suites to ensure detailed behavior coverage.

• Drive improvements in standardized on-road testing methodologies and contribute to the design of closed-loop simulation testing frameworks.

• Design and develop GenAI/ML-powered workflows and tooling to improve triage efficiency, issue analysis, and testing productivity.

• Participate regularly in in-vehicle testing missions to evaluate real-world behavior of autonomous driving features (requires up to 4 weeks of travel per quarter).

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related technical field.

• Experience in autonomous driving system testing, robotics testing, or ML system validation.

• Strong understanding of machine learning system behavior and autonomous driving workflows.

• Experience with simulation-based testing, scenario generation, or validation pipelines.

• Strong debugging and root cause analysis skills for complex system behaviors.

• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.

• Ability to work in fast-paced and highly iterative development environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with VLA, end-to-end driving models, or multimodal ML systems.

• Familiarity with closed-loop simulation systems and autonomous vehicle evaluation methodologies.

• Experience with data analysis tools such as Python, SQL, or visualization frameworks.

• Experience designing testing infrastructure, evaluation pipelines, or automated regression systems.

• Familiarity with vehicle logs, sensor data analysis, and autonomous driving metrics.

• Experience building internal tooling using LLMs, GenAI agents, or ML-assisted workflows.

• Hands-on experience participating in vehicle testing operations.

What you will bring:

• Strong ownership mindset and attention to detail.

• Ability to connect feature changes with system-level driving behaviors.

• Passion for autonomous driving, robotics, and AI systems.

• Structured thinking and the ability to operate effectively under ambiguity.

• A practical mindset focused on accelerating iteration velocity while maintaining quality and safety standards.

What do we provide:

• A collaborative, research-driven environment with access tomassive real-world data and industry-scale compute.

• An opportunity to work with top-tier researchers and engineers advancing the frontier of foundation models for autonomous driving.

• Direct impact on the next generation of intelligent mobility systems.

• Opportunity to make significant impact on the transportation revolution by the means of advancing autonomous driving.

• Competitive compensation package.

• Snacks, lunches, dinners, and fun activities.

The base salary range for this full-time position is $179,400-$303,600, in addition to bonus, equity and benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. It is our policy to provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified persons without regard to race, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, disability, veteran status or marital status or any other prescribed category set forth in federal or state regulations.