Machine Learning Engineer, Digital Optimus

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Machine Learning Engineer, Digital Optimus

| Job Category | Tesla AI | | Location | Palo Alto, California | | Req. ID | 272309 | | Job Type | Full-time |

What to Expect

As a Machine Learning Engineer at Tesla AI working on Digital Optimus, you will build training, inference, data, and evaluation systems for frontier computer-use agents. These agents combine high-level reasoning models with real-time vision to ingest computer screen video, understand UIs, execute actions, and complete complex digital workflows autonomously.

We are looking for ML generalists or domain specialists with strong applied ML fundamentals who excel at turning research ideas into reliable production systems.

What You’ll Do

• Build training pipelines that turn real agent interactions (screen data, actions, outcomes) into model improvements
• Design model architecture and training recipes to improve performance in a scientific way.
• Design evaluation frameworks and benchmarks to measure agent performance and identify failure modes
• Create data systems that extract high-quality signals from agent runs for continuous iteration
• Develop inference and model routing logic to combine reasoning and vision models efficiently in real time
• Ship end-to-end improvements that increase agent reliability and autonomy on long-horizon tasks

What You’ll Bring

• Strong applied ML fundamentals with a passion for turning research into robust, production-grade systems

• Experience designing model architectures and/or building training workflows, evaluation tools, data pipelines, or inference optimizations

• Solid software engineering skills and a high sense of ownership

• Background in agentic systems and/or multimodal (vision + language) models

• Excitement about making multimodal models reliable and effective in real-world agentic environments

• Experience with post-training or RL methods (PPO, GRPO, RLHF) is a strong plus

Compensation and Benefits

Benefits

• Along with competitive pay, as a full-time Tesla employee, you are eligible for the following benefits at day 1 of hire:

• Medical plans > plan options with $0 payroll deduction

• Family-building, fertility, adoption and surrogacy benefits

• Dental (including orthodontic coverage) and vision plans, both have options with a $0 paycheck contribution

• Company Paid (Health Savings Accounts) 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, 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 to include: 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

• Expected Compensation

• $124,000 - $420,000/annual salary + cash and stock awards + benefits

Pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package for this position may also include other elements dependent on the position offered. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.

Tesla is an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any factor, including veteran status and disability status, protected by applicable federal, state or local laws.

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