Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Autonomous Driving)

TL;DR

Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Autonomous Driving): Leading the development of data pipelines and ML solutions for the Waymo Driver's decision-making and motion planning with an accent on data mining, model finetuning, and reward function shaping. Focus on building scalable evaluation workflows, integrating models into the autonomous fleet, and mentoring engineers in data-centric reasoning approaches.

Location: Onsite in Mountain View or San Francisco, California

Salary: $251,000–$310,000 USD

Company

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company dedicated to building the world's most trusted driver to improve mobility and safety.

What you will do

• Lead and develop data pipelines for ML-driven decision-making and motion planning.
• Prototype ideas for data pipeline improvements and conduct model finetuning.
• Integrate and deploy ML models on the fleet with end-to-end validation.
• Collaborate with perception, research, simulation, and evaluation teams.
• Mentor engineers on adopting data-primary approaches for reasoning problems.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering or machine learning experience.
• Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field.
• Applied experience in data shaping, feature engineering, and loss/reward function design.
• Experience contributing to scalable evaluation workflows and building ML metrics.
• Proficiency in handling large-scale models and datasets with high-quality API design.

Nice to have

• Experience with LLMs, VLMs, deep learning, or reinforcement learning.
• Background in autonomous driving, motion planning, or perception.
• Proficiency in C++, Python, and SQL.

Culture & Benefits

• Participation in discretionary annual bonus program and equity incentive plan.
• Comprehensive company benefits program.
• Opportunity to work on industry-leading autonomous driving technology.