Foundation Model Data, Software Engineer

About the role

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. In this hybrid role, you will report to a Principal Research Scientist.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the petabyte-scale data systems and ML pipelines at the heart of Waymo's foundation model development
• Shepherd cutting-edge foundation models from research prototypes to robust components within the Waymo Driver
• Develop automated, high-performance infrastructure to ensure the dependable and efficient rollout of data solutions at the forefront of Waymo foundation model program
• Wield large-scale compute and frameworks like Flume/Beam and JAX to process massive datasets for training, evaluating and deploying complex models
• Drive significant leaps in the speed, reliability, and efficiency of the end-to-end ML development lifecycle
• Partner with experts in AI Foundations, ML, and Platform to transform model innovations into tangible improvements to Waymo’s product

Requirements

• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, similar technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience
• Proficiency in Python and C++
• Experience building or maintaining large-scale data pipelines or ML infrastructure (e.g., Flume, Spark, Borg, Kubeflow)
• Strong hands-on SWE skills, able to drive development of large, complex shared codebases

Preferred

• Experience designing and building distributed systems or MLOps platforms (e.g., model versioning, experiment tracking, CI/CD for ML)
• Familiarity with one of the modern deep learning frameworks (e.g. Pytorch, JAX, Tensorflow)
• Experience in AV planning and related research
• Prior work in an industrial or research setting developing methodologies for data-centric improvement of ML models
• Previous data curation experience and multimodal experience

Benefits

• Health, dental, vision insurance
• Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match
• Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment
• Sick Time: 40 hours/year (statutory, where applicable); 5 days/event (discretionary)
• Maternity Leave (Short-Term Disability + Baby Bonding): 28-30 weeks
• Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks
• Holidays: 13 paid days per year

Pay

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is $213,000—$263,000 USD.

Schedule

This is a hybrid role, combining both remote and in-office work.