Director, Foundation Model Data Recipes (AI)

TL;DR

Director, Foundation Model Data Recipes (AI): Leading the development of data recipes for Foundation World Models with an accent on pre-training, post-training, and the data flywheel. Focus on managing scientists to optimize scaling ladders, data mixes, and RL recipes for post-training.

Location: On-site or Hybrid in Mountain View, California, USA

Salary: $349,000—$431,000 USD

Company

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company developing the Waymo Driver to improve mobility and safety through fully autonomous ride-hailing services.

What you will do

• Own the data recipe for Foundation World Model pre-training and post-training.
• Develop best practices for clustering, filtering, de-duplication, and long-tail data mining.
• Lead a team of research engineers to build a data flywheel utilizing massive driving datasets.
• Manage scientists working on scaling ladders, data mix optimizations, and RL recipes.
• Engage with the global research community on data-centric evaluation creation and refinement.
• Partner with internal engineering and research teams to accelerate collective knowledge on post-training best practices.

Requirements

• PhD or Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a similar technical field.
• 5+ years of industry or post-doc research experience in Reinforcement Learning or Foundation Models.
• Proven track record of original contributions via high-impact publications (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR) or significant open-source contributions.
• Experience leading teams of research scientists and engineers to deploy real-world AI impact.
• Must be based in or able to work from Mountain View, California.

Nice to have

• Extensive experience working with data recipes for large-scale foundation models.
• PhD research focus on Data-centric AI, Multimodal learning, or Reinforcement Learning.

Culture & Benefits

• Discretionary annual bonus program.
• Equity incentive plan.
• Generous company benefits program.
• Opportunity to work on world-leading autonomous driving technology.