Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Vision-Language Foundation Models)

TL;DR

Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Vision-Language Foundation Models): Leading the technical strategy for multimodal foundation models to power autonomous driving perception with an accent on pre-training data curation, SFT, and RLHF pipelines. Focus on scaling multimodal training recipes, architecting data flywheels, and driving cross-functional AI strategy to redefine autonomous vehicle scene understanding.

Location: Onsite in Mountain View, California

Salary: $251,000–$310,000 USD

Company

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company dedicated to building the world's most trusted driver and improving mobility through advanced AI and robotics.

What you will do

• Lead technical strategy for curating massive-scale multimodal pre-training datasets.
• Design and implement state-of-the-art fine-tuning and reinforcement learning pipelines.
• Architect scalable inference and evaluation pipelines for autolabeling edge cases.
• Conduct ablation studies to optimize model architectures, token budgets, and loss functions.
• Drive cross-functional AI strategy across ML Infra, Perception, and Behavior teams.
• Provide staff-level technical leadership, mentoring senior engineers and owning the long-term roadmap.

Requirements

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI, ML, or related field.
• 8+ years of experience in deep learning, with 3+ years focused on LLMs or VLMs.
• Expertise in the full lifecycle of foundation models, including pre-training and distributed training.
• Deep understanding of training infrastructure (e.g., FSDP, Megatron, JAX/Pax).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in Python, PyTorch, or JAX.
• Proven ability to operate with high ambiguity and drive multi-quarter initiatives.

Nice to have

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, or related field.
• Strong publication record in top-tier AI venues (NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR).
• Experience with advanced RL paradigms for logical deduction and model alignment.
• Expertise in data engineering for foundation models at the scale of billions/trillions of tokens.
• Familiarity with multimodal perception challenges in robotics or autonomous driving.

Culture & Benefits

• Discretionary annual bonus program and equity incentive plan.
• Comprehensive company benefits program.
• Opportunity to work on world-class autonomous driving technology.
• Collaborative environment with cross-functional AI and perception teams.