Software Engineer, Multimodal Semantics
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 the system that "sees" the world around the self-driving car. We conduct novel research to address real-world perception problems and collaborate with research teams at Alphabet. Here at Waymo, we have access to millions of miles of driving data from a diverse set of sensors, enabling researchers like you to develop complex models and techniques at scale. Improvements deployed to our system can immediately help our large fleet of autonomous vehicles.
The Multimodal Semantics team (within the Semantics Foundation group) is building the multimodal vision-language foundation models for autonomous driving tasks. The current projects include multimodal sensor fusion, temporal VLM, and VLM onboard infra. This role is for someone with both strong ML expertise (especially in state-of-art generative modeling and LLM/VLM), and strong execution to land research into Waymo’s products.
In this hybrid role, you will report to the Technical Lead Manager of the Multimodal Semantics team.
You will:
- Develop and deploy deep learning models, including vision language models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Develop data mining, labeling, training and eval pipelines to support the onboard development
- Collaborate and work in partnership with research teams across Alphabet
You have:
- BS degree in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of deep learning experience
- 3+ years experience with Large Language Models (LLM) or Vision Language Models (VLM)
- Experience with Python
- Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks such as Jax, PyTorch, Tensorflow
We prefer:
- PhD degree in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of deep learning experience
- Publications on top-tier conferences like CVPR/ICCV/ECCV/ICLR/ICML/NeurIPS/ICLR/AAAI/IJCV/PAMI
- Github repositories or Tech Blogs of LLMs/ VLMs
- Experience with C++
#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.