Jef Packer is a Research Engineer who has helped bring many projects from research to production. After receiving his B.S. and M.Eng. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from UC Davis, he spent over a decade building autonomous driving systems. He started at Tesla, where he worked on Autopilot v1, then spent six years at Zoox progressing from firmware and classical planning to leading collision avoidance and ML-based planning research.
Jef joined NVIDIA in 2024, where he led production efforts on Alpamayo's end-to-end driving stack before moving to NVIDIA Research in 2026. His research interests include interaction-aware planning and decision-making for robots utilizing techniques such as latent world models and RL.
