Senior ML Engineer, Foundation Model

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the 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 One, a fully autonomous ride-hailing service, and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over one million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving tens of millions of miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 13 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 our work, we also initiate and foster collaborations with other research teams in Alphabet. AI Foundations areas that we are currently focusing on include reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, generative modeling, Bayesian inference, hierarchical learning, and robust evaluation.

In this hybrid role, you will report to a Research TLM.

You Will

• Extend and fine-tune existing large vision-language models (e.g. Gemini)
• Build datasets and train infrastructure for driving specific tasks (trajectory planning and rationale, spatial reasoning, semantic understanding, etc)
• Leverage language to model the driving rationale and environment context
• Collaborate with other teams at Waymo to improve Waymo product
  
  

You Have

• In-depth knowledge of designing and training large language models and multi-modal applications
• Experience in end-to-end product development
• Experience in training generative models and multi-task networks at scale
• Experience in large-scale distributed training and optimization
• Experience in large-scale training dataset curation
• Bachelor degree or above in relevant fields and 5 years of industrial experience
• Proficiency in C and Python
  
  

We Prefer

• Experience in landing foundation models in production
• Experience in autonomous vehicles or motion planning
• Masters/PhD degree in relevant fields, e.g., computer science, machine learning, or robotics, and 3 years of industrial experience
  
  

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is listed below. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the role location or, if the role can be performed remote, the specific salary range for your preferred location, during the hiring process.

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.

Salary Range

$204,000—$259,000 USD