Machine Learning Engineer II - Learned Planning (Reinforcement Learning)

About the Company

At Torc, we have always believed that autonomous vehicle technology will transform how we travel, move freight, and do business.

A leader in autonomous driving since 2007, Torc has spent over a decade commercializing our solutions with experienced partners.

Now a part of the Daimler family

, we are focused solely on developing software for automated trucks to transform how the world moves freight.

Join us and catapult your career with the company that helped pioneer autonomous technology, and the first AV software company with the vision to partner directly with a truck manufacturer.

Meet the Team:

As a Machine Learning Engineer II – Learned Behaviors, you will help develop and deploy  behavior models that power decision-making for autonomous trucks. Working closely with teams across perception, prediction, planning, and safety, you will contribute to learned behavior modules that enable safe, efficient, and human-like driving in real-world freight operations.

This role focuses on building, validating, and improving machine learning models and infrastructure that support learned behavior systems within the autonomy stack.

What You’ll Do

• Develop and train machine learning models for learned behavior systems, including approaches such as behavior cloning, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning.
• Implement production-quality ML code to support model training, evaluation, and inference within the autonomy stack.
• Analyze model performance, identify failure modes, and propose improvements to increase robustness and generalization across scenarios.
• Contribute to model training pipelines and data workflows, curating behavior datasets from simulation, fleet logs, and on-vehicle data.
• Collaborate with simulation, validation, and autonomy engineering teams to test and evaluate learned behavior models across diverse driving environments.
• Help integrate learned behavior models into simulation and testing workflows, enabling faster iteration and more comprehensive validation.
• Support the development of tooling and infrastructure that improves experimentation speed, reproducibility, and model iteration.
• Contribute to technical discussions around model architecture and training strategies within the team.

What You’ll Need to Succeed

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related technical field with 4+ years of industry experience, or a Master’s degree with 2+ years of experience.

Experience applying machine learning techniques such as imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or sequence modeling to robotics, autonomous systems, or complex control environments.

Strong programming skills in Python and PyTorch, with experience writing production-quality ML code.

Experience training and evaluating machine learning models using large datasets and scalable compute environments.

Understanding of ML architectures used in autonomy systems, such as transformers, graph neural networks, or sequence models.

Experience debugging model behavior, analyzing performance metrics, and iterating on training pipelines.

Ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate ML models into larger software systems.

Bonus Points!

Experience working in autonomous driving, robotics, or simulation-based training environments.

Experience with reinforcement learning frameworks or distributed training systems (e.g., Ray).

Experience working with simulation environments or large-scale behavior datasets.

Familiarity with vehicle dynamics, motion planning, or multi-agent decision-making systems.

Experience deploying ML models into production or real-world robotics systems.