Staff Machine Learning Engineer – VLM/LLM Staff Research Scientist, Perception Machine Learning Engineer, Prediction & Planning (AI)

Location: Onsite/hybrid role based in Mountain View or San Francisco, California, or New York City, New York

Salary: $238,000–$302,000 USD annual base salary

Company

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

What you will do

• Build state-of-the-art foundation models used onboard autonomous vehicles and in offboard simulation.
• Lead end-to-end evaluation systems and benchmarks for foundation models across pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning.
• Evaluate the quality, safety, and realism of embodied AI agents.
• Partner across organizations to bring innovative machine learning technology into production.
• Implement and extend large-scale data and evaluation pipelines.

Requirements

• Master’s or PhD degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in machine learning engineering and applied deep learning.
• Strong portfolio of shipped products or research publications.
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems.
• Proficiency in Python and C/C++.
• Strong analytical and debugging skills.

Nice to have

• Machine learning infrastructure experience, including training, evaluating, and deploying models at scale.
• Experience with generative models such as LLMs or VLMs and/or reinforcement learning.
• In-depth knowledge of an ML framework such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.

Culture & Benefits

• Creative, collaborative work with research and engineering teams across Waymo and Alphabet.
• Health, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• 401(k) with company match.
• Paid vacation, sick time, paid holidays, maternity leave, and baby bonding leave.
• Eligibility for annual bonus, equity incentives, and additional company benefits.