Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Autonomous Driving)

Location: Mountain View, California, United States; the role is listed as on-site and also described as hybrid.

Salary: $213,000–$263,000 USD per year, 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

• Develop, evaluate, and release learned driving policies for complex navigation and yielding scenarios.
• Bridge multimodal perception and planning outputs to produce robust behavioral actions.
• Deploy learned models into closed-loop simulation environments and benchmark them against safety metrics.
• Drive the transition of validated models into production autonomous navigation systems.
• Advance the shift from rule-based heuristics to scalable, data-driven learned policies.

Requirements

• 2–5+ years of experience training and releasing machine learning models in autonomous driving, robotics, or complex spatial AI.
• Hands-on experience across both perception and planning stacks.
• Experience with learned driving policies, including reinforcement learning or imitation learning.
• Proficiency with PyTorch or JAX and closed-loop simulator evaluation.
• Track record of releasing machine learning models to production.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with Vision-Language-Action models and world models.
• Experience using foundation models and AI tools for scenario generation, evaluation analysis, and rapid experimentation.

Culture & Benefits

• Cross-functional work at the intersection of perception and planning.
• Participation in a discretionary annual bonus program, subject to eligibility.
• Eligibility for an equity incentive plan and company benefits program.