Principal Software Engineer, ML System Architect

The Waymo Systems Intelligence and Machine Learning (SIML) team is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the development of a unified, large-scale AI platform leveraging Google DeepMind's latest foundation models (like Gemini) for comprehensive world understanding and generation. This role is pivotal in transforming Waymo's offboard ML landscape from a fragmented set of models and tools into a cohesive, efficient, and powerful platform centered around a unified foundation model recipe, deeply integrated with Google Deepmind's latest innovations with Gemini.

Architect ML Systems

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for the platform, encompassing codebase unification, data pipelines, model architecture, training recipes, and evaluation frameworks.
• Lead the unification of existing forked locations of foundation model component codebases into a production-hardened, shared repository.
• Establish and enforce rigorous coding standards, testing practices, and API designs to ensure long-term codebase health and developer velocity.
• Serve as the primary technical interface between Waymo's offboard model development and Google Deepmind's core model and framework teams.
• Define clear APIs and integration patterns, ensuring Waymo can seamlessly leverage and contribute to Google Deepmind's advancements while maintaining stability and control.
• Drive the consolidation of tokenization/de-tokenization strategies, data formats, input pipelines, and evaluation methodologies across all offboard Foundation Model use cases.
• Architect for efficient large-scale distributed training (large scale) and establish a common, efficient distillation setup to transfer knowledge from large teacher models to onboard student models.

Technical Leadership & Influence

• Provide technical mentorship, guidance, and direction to engineers across multiple teams within SIML and AI Foundations.
• Drive alignment on technical decisions with senior stakeholders across Waymo and Google Deepmind.

Experience

• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science or a related field.
• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 8+ years focused on large-scale machine learning systems, deep learning frameworks, and AI infrastructure.
• Deep expertise in Python, C++, and ML frameworks like JAX and TensorFlow.
• Extensive experience with large-scale distributed training on TPUs/GPUs and associated challenges.
• Understanding of data pipelines, storage systems, and tokenization techniques.
• Experience working effectively with research and product teams, and influencing across organizational boundaries.
• Technical leadership skills, with the ability to drive strategy, influence across teams, and mentor other engineers.
• Communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical vision and drive alignment, capable of conveying complex technical ideas clearly.

We Prefer:

• Experience with multimodal and generative models.
• Experience in autonomous vehicle systems or robotics.
• Contributions to open-source ML frameworks or widely used internal tools.
• Experience with simulation systems.