Staff ML Accelerator Architect

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.

Waymo's Compute Team is tasked with a critical and exciting mission: delivering the compute platform responsible for running the fully autonomous vehicle's software stack. The team architects and creates high-performance custom silicon, develops system-level compute architectures that push the boundaries of performance, power, and latency, and collaborates closely with many other teammates to ensure hardware and software are designed and optimized for maximum performance. This is a multidisciplinary team working on one of the world's highest performance automotive compute platforms.

In this role, you will report to a Hardware Engineering Manager.

Responsibilities

• Analyze inference workloads and map them efficiently to hardware, proposing novel HW-friendly implementations and projecting performance
• Build scalable tools for performance modeling and evaluation of inference workloads
• Work closely with compiler and model developers to influence engineering tradeoffs and future model architectures
• Architect, simulate and design novel hardware solutions for state-of-the-art autonomous driving models
• Interact with cross-functional engineering teams to identify opportunities and realize architectural vision

Requirements

• M.S. degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years designing/architecting complex, high-performance architectures — CPUs, GPUs, and/or ML accelerators — in industry or through doctoral research
• 3+ years experience with machine learning architectures, acceleration, and model optimization
• Deep knowledge of ML model architectures and their compute characteristics (bottlenecks, optimization opportunities)
• Strong programming and algorithmic problem-solving skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Track record of analyzing workloads and architecting, delivering novel HW+SW solutions to vastly improve performance and efficiency for ML inference
• Proven ability leading cross-functional teams to deliver architectural vision
• Familiarity with novel semiconductor technologies and their tradeoffs across the full hardware stack
• Experience with microarchitecture design (SystemVerilog or HLS)

Pay

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is $251,000—$310,000 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.