Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Autonomous Driving)

TL;DR

Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Autonomous Driving): Leading the technical strategy for automating data pipelines and building auto-labeling systems for the Waymo Driver with an accent on computer vision and Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Focus on training, deploying, and orchestrating state-of-the-art ML architectures to solve complex semantic labeling challenges at scale.

Location: Must be based in Mountain View, California (Hybrid)

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 the design and deployment of highly scalable auto-labeling pipelines to improve data throughput.
• Develop automated anomaly detection and quality evaluation systems (auto-graders) to enforce rigorous standards.
• Train, optimize, and deploy advanced 2D and 3D computer vision models into production.
• Fine-tune and deploy large VLMs and LLMs using prompt optimization and post-training techniques.
• Set long-term ML strategy and mentor senior and mid-level engineers.
• Collaborate with Perception, Planner, and Simulation teams to align labeling capabilities with data needs.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional experience in software engineering and applied machine learning.
• Proficiency in C++ or Python.
• Experience building, evaluating, and deploying deep learning models for object detection, segmentation, and spatial tracking.
• Expertise in large model training, distributed computing, and scaling architectures using PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Proven track record of taking ML solutions through the entire lifecycle to production deployment.

Nice to have

• Experience building internal tooling for ML developers.

Culture & Benefits

• Discretionary annual bonus program.
• Equity incentive plan.
• Comprehensive company benefits program.
• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge autonomous driving technology.