Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Runtime and Serving Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Perception LLM/VLM (AI)

Location: Mountain View, California, United States; onsite designation with a hybrid work arrangement also stated

Salary: $213,000–$263,000 USD annual base salary

Company

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

What you will do

• Architect and develop high-performance ML runtime and serving systems for autonomous vehicle compute and large-scale data centers.
• Integrate inference runtimes while balancing real-time latency and memory constraints with high-throughput, concurrent offboard serving.
• Drive migration of ML workloads to a JAX-native runtime architecture using OpenXLA/PjRT and TensorRT.
• Collaborate with perception, planner, and research teams on system-level workloads and hardware-aware optimizations.
• Build profiling and benchmarking tools to identify bottlenecks across the ML software stack.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, electrical engineering, deep learning, or a related field.
• 5+ years of professional experience building, scaling, or maintaining ML systems and infrastructure.
• 5+ years of production C++ programming experience.
• 3+ years of production Python experience with major deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Experience optimizing ML software for GPUs, TPUs, or custom silicon.
• Experience building low-latency, highly concurrent distributed backend systems.

Nice to have

• PhD in computer science, electrical engineering, deep learning, or a related field.
• Experience modifying ML compilers, runtimes, or inference engines such as TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, OpenXLA/PjRT, or TVM.
• Experience building or scaling LLM serving systems, distributed inference, KV or prefix caching, and continuous batching.
• Experience with custom kernel development using CUDA, CUDA Tile, Triton, JAX, or Pallas.
• Experience architecting unified serving APIs and optimizing tensor buffer management for multi-model inference pipelines.

Culture & Benefits

• Work across the ML stack with teams in perception, planning, research, and simulation.
• Eligibility for a discretionary annual bonus program.
• Eligibility for an equity incentive plan.
• Generous company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.