ML Engineer

About The Company

Waymo is a pioneering autonomous driving technology company committed to transforming mobility and enhancing safety on the roads. Originating from the Google Self-Driving Car Project launched in 2009, Waymo has dedicated itself to developing the Waymo Driver—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—aimed at providing accessible, reliable, and safe autonomous transportation solutions. With a focus on saving lives and reducing traffic-related fatalities, Waymo's technology powers a fully autonomous ride-hail service and is adaptable across various vehicle platforms and applications. The company has accumulated extensive real-world driving experience, having completed over ten million rider-only trips and driven more than 100 million miles on public roads across more than 15 states in the U.S., complemented by tens of billions of miles in simulation.

About The Role

We are seeking a highly skilled Staff Machine Learning Engineer specializing in VLM/LLM Evaluation to join our AI Foundations team. This role is pivotal in advancing the development and evaluation of foundational models that underpin Waymo's autonomous systems. You will lead efforts to design, implement, and optimize end-to-end evaluation pipelines and benchmarks for large-scale models, ensuring their safety, quality, and realism in real-world autonomous driving scenarios. Collaborating across teams and integrating innovative machine learning techniques, you will help push the boundaries of embodied AI agents within the autonomous vehicle ecosystem. This position offers a hybrid work schedule and reports to a Senior Staff Software Engineer, providing an excellent opportunity to influence cutting-edge research and deployment in autonomous driving technology.

Qualifications

• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• Minimum of 5+ years of experience in machine learning engineering and applied deep learning, with a strong portfolio of shipped products or publications
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python and C/C++
• Experience working with large-scale distributed systems
• Strong analytical skills and debugging expertise
• Knowledge of ML frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow

Responsibilities

• Lead the development of comprehensive evaluation systems and benchmarks for Waymo Foundation Models, covering the entire lifecycle from pretraining and supervised fine-tuning to reinforcement learning
• Design and implement scalable data pipelines and evaluation frameworks to assess model safety, quality, and realism in autonomous driving contexts
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate innovative machine learning solutions into production environments
• Extend and optimize large-scale data processing and evaluation workflows to support model development and validation
• Stay abreast of the latest research in generative models, reinforcement learning, and related fields, applying advancements to improve system performance
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of evaluation methodologies and tools for embodied AI agents

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance coverage
• Life and disability insurance plans
• Retirement savings plan with 401(k) matching
• Paid time off including 20 vacation days annually, accrued per pay period
• Sick leave entitlement of 40 hours per year
• Maternity and baby bonding leave, totaling up to 30 weeks
• 13 paid holidays each year
• Participation in discretionary annual bonus and equity incentive plans
• Access to extensive professional development and growth opportunities