Senior ML Engineer, Perception Research

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, the team initiates and fosters collaborations with other research teams in Alphabet. Current focus areas include reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, generative modeling, Bayesian inference, hierarchical learning, and robust evaluation. This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to a Principal Research Scientist.

Responsibilities

• Conduct comprehensive experimentation to train and deploy state-of-the-art Multimodal LLMs and World models to perform 3D Perception using sensor information from Camera, LiDAR, and Radar.
• Write high-quality code, unit tests, and documentation.
• Collaborate effectively with partner and customer teams to deploy models to production.
• Develop and maintain scalable data pipelines for Training & Eval to process data from multiple sources.
• Design and implement evaluation frameworks for perception models.
• Implement efficient training & inference optimization methods to maximize throughput.
• Apply hands-on experience with Transformer architectures, including in-depth knowledge of training ablations.

Requirements

• PhD or Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a similar technical field, with 2+ years of industry or post-doc research experience in Reinforcement Learning or Foundation Models.
• Proficiency in implementing model training flows in a scalable, distributed, and performant manner, such as Data parallel, FSDP, and other sharding approaches.
• A willingness to work with the complexity of globally distributed inference infrastructure.

Preferred Qualifications

• Extensive experience training and deploying Computer Vision models to solve 3D perception tasks.
• Hands-on experience in training/fine-tuning production-quality 3D Multimodal models and respective encoders.
• Substantial involvement in and contributions to high-impact industry AI projects.
• Experience in generative models for domains such as world models, images, videos, 3D, using techniques such as diffusion or autoregressive models.

Benefits

• Health, dental, vision, life, and disability 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. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.