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

Location: Hybrid work schedule in Mountain View or San Francisco, California, or New York City, New York

Salary: $238,000–$302,000 USD per year, plus potential annual bonus and equity incentives

Company

Waymo develops autonomous driving technology and fully autonomous ride-hailing services through the Waymo Driver.

What you will do

• Build state-of-the-art foundation models used onboard autonomous vehicles and offboard in simulation.
• Lead end-to-end evaluation systems and benchmarks for Waymo foundation models.
• Evaluate model quality, safety, and realism across pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning.
• 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 in Computer Science, a similar technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in machine learning engineering and applied deep learning.
• Strong portfolio of shipped products or a publication record.
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems.
• Proficient programming skills 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.
• Deep learning 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

• Health, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• 401(k) retirement plan with company match.
• 20 vacation days per year and paid holidays.
• Paid sick time, maternity leave, and baby bonding leave.
• Annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and company benefits for eligible employees.