Staff Tech Lead, Perception, Pre-training & Distillation (AI)

Location: On-site in Mountain View, California, or San Francisco, California

Salary: $251,000–$310,000 USD annual base salary, plus discretionary annual bonus, equity incentive plan, and company benefits.

Company

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

What you will do

• Train multi-billion-parameter spatio-temporal foundation models on multi-billion-frame datasets.
• Deliver pre-trained models for production use, including real-time systems.
• Develop self-supervised learning methods for image and video encoders, 3D point cloud encoders, spatio-temporal reconstruction, future prediction, and vision-language contrastive learning.
• Design multi-teacher distillation recipes and methods for evaluating latent representations.
• Curate diverse datasets and collaborate with post-training and downstream teams on production integration.
• Contribute to technical roadmaps for perception and autonomous driving systems.

Requirements

• MS or PhD in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or equivalent deep learning experience.
• 5+ years of experience in machine learning and/or computer vision.
• Fluent Python programming skills.
• In-depth experience with PyTorch or JAX.
• Ability to work on-site in Mountain View or San Francisco, California.

Nice to have

• Publications at top-tier machine learning or computer vision conferences and journals.
• Experience with C++.
• Experience with real-time system design.

Culture & Benefits

• Access to millions of miles of real-world driving data from diverse sensors.
• Collaboration with research teams at Alphabet and downstream Waymo Driver teams.
• Eligibility for a discretionary annual bonus program and equity incentive plan.
• Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.