Sr Staff Tech Lead, Machine Learning Engineer, Perception (Autonomous Driving)

Location: Mountain View, California or San Francisco, California; onsite and hybrid work arrangements are stated.

Salary: $298,000–$368,000 USD annual base salary, plus eligibility for an annual bonus, equity incentive plan, and company benefits.

Company

Waymo develops autonomous driving technology and operates a fully autonomous ride-hail service powered by the Waymo Driver.

What you will do

• Set the long-term technical roadmap for next-generation multimodal perception architectures.
• Advance multi-task learning, spatial-temporal modeling, and scene representation.
• Architect unified and scalable representations across diverse sensor modalities and heterogeneous sensor suites.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives with Perception, Planner, hardware, and infrastructure teams.
• Optimize foundational architectures for onboard requirements and mentor machine learning engineers.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of industry experience in machine learning, AI, or computer vision.
• Experience architecting and shipping large-scale, production-grade machine learning models.
• Expert proficiency in Python, C++, and modern machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
• Experience leading large technical initiatives across cross-functional teams as a Tech Lead.

Nice to have

• PhD with publications at top-tier venues.
• Industrial experience with multimodal foundation models, 3D perception, or end-to-end autonomous driving systems.
• Experience designing modular, sensor-agnostic perception frameworks for diverse configurations.

Culture & Benefits

• Access to large-scale real-world driving data and extensive simulation resources.
• Collaboration with research teams at Alphabet.
• Eligibility for a discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and company benefits program.