Staff Tech Lead, Machine Learning Engineer, Perception

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. In this hybrid role, you'll report to a Staff Technical Lead Manager.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of multi-sensor, multi-task model architectures for dense and complete scene understanding with a focus on key tasks including object detection, occupancy prediction, road understanding, and trajectory planning.
• Architect and develop the foundational modeling libraries and software powering model development and experimentation.
• Design and implement scalable core model components, including sensor encoders, sensor fusion modules, backbones, and temporal aggregation / memory blocks.
• Adapt SOTA ML technologies to unique compute requirements, leading optimizations for latency, throughput, and memory to operate efficiently within strict compute budgets.
• Drive rapid prototyping by building and maintaining flexible pipelines and development environments for fast iteration on novel model designs, enabling seamless integration of field advancements and in-depth analysis of model training dynamics and learned representations.

Requirements

• Bachelors in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of deep learning experience.
• 7+ years experience in Machine Learning and/or Computer Vision.
• Strong expertise in Python and C++ and a solid software engineering background.
• Experience with ML frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, or Tensorflow.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD Degree in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science or a similar discipline (preferred).
• Publications at top-tier conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, ICRA, IROS, RSS, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCV, PAMI.

Benefits

• Discretionary annual bonus program.
• Equity incentive plan.
• Generous Company benefits program (subject to eligibility).

Pay

Salary Range $251,000—$310,000 USD