Senior Staff Software Engineer, ML Engineering, Perception
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 Perception team at Waymo builds technology that powers the Waymo Driver. Our software allows the Waymo Driver to perceive the world around it, make the right decision for every situation, and deliver people safely to their destinations. We conduct research to address real-world problems and collaborate with research teams at Alphabet. We have access to millions of miles of driving data from a diverse set of sensors, enabling ML practitioners like you to develop multi-modal models and techniques at scale.
In this hybrid role, you will report to the Director of Engineering.
You will:
- Work closely with ML engineers and infrastructure teams to design, set the roadmap, and implement the multi-stage training system that builds the foundation models and onboard models
- Optimize end-to-end training latency, to meet our release cadence while minimizing time-to-impact from new issues in the field to model update on the car
- Solve large-scale training with multi-model, multi-task, and large models, with millions of miles of driving data
- Provide technical leadership on the efficacy and efficiency of production critical models’ training system
- Drive and accelerate collaborations between Perception, infra teams at Waymo, and Alphabet collaborators
You have:
- Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
- 8+ years of experience in ML-related software development
- 6+ years of experience in ML-driven production systems that develops models with large-scale data, training, evaluation, and deployment
- 4+ years of experience in a technical leadership role leading technical teams and setting technical directions
- 3+ years of experience with computer vision models, or LLMs, or vision language models
- Passion to drive engineering excellence and efficient model development through flywheel automation, while having direct technical experience in model quality development to achieve business goals
We prefer:
- Experience in LLM and / or multi-modality LM pretraining and fine-tuning, and their infrastructure
- Experience in model distillation techniques and infrastructure
- Familiarity with vision-based models and their development challenges
- Agility in a fast-paced environment
#LI-hybrid
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.