Director, Foundation Model Data Recipes

About the role

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

The mission of the Waymo AI Foundations team is to develop machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving, towards the goal of safely operating Waymo vehicles in dozens of cities and under all driving conditions. As part of this work, we also initiate and foster collaborations with other research teams in Alphabet. AI Foundations areas that we are currently focusing on include reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, generative modeling, Bayesian inference, hierarchical learning, and robust evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Participate in Waymo’s Foundation World Model pre-training and post-training by owning the data recipe
• Invest in data best practices—clustering, filtering, de-duplication, long-tail data mining, memorization, etc.—and lead a team of research engineers to build the data flywheel from Waymo’s massive driving data
• Integrate emerging research from the broader community to perform rigorous ablations and apply promising data research techniques
• Manage a team of scientists working on scaling ladders for pre-training, data mix optimizations, and RL recipes (preferences) for post-training
• Engage with the wider research community on best practices around data-centric evaluation creation and refinement
• Partner with engineering and research teams across Waymo to share recipes, techniques, and post-training best practices to accelerate collective know-how

Requirements

• PhD or Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a similar technical field; with 5+ years of industry or post-doc research experience in Reinforcement Learning or Foundation Models
• Demonstration of original contributions to the field through high-impact publications (ArXiv, peer-reviewed conferences like NeurIPS/ICLR/CVPR), technical blog posts, or significant open-source contributions
• Experience leading teams of research scientists and engineers to deploy real-world impact in AI, including hands-on ability to adapt models as needed

Preferred Qualifications

• Extensive experience working with data and recipes for large-scale foundation models
• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or Robotics, with a research focus on Data-centric AI, Reinforcement Learning, Foundation Models, or Multimodal learning

Pay

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is $349,000—$431,000 USD. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level.

Benefits

Waymo employees are eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.