Senior ML Engineer, Perception Research (AI)

TL;DR

Senior ML Engineer, Perception Research (AI) (Multimodal ML/3D Perception): Building and deploying multimodal models and world models for 3D perception in autonomous vehicles using camera, LiDAR, and radar data with an accent on scalable training, inference optimization, and robust evaluation. Focus on designing distributed training systems, developing data and evaluation pipelines, and solving complex perception challenges across real-world driving conditions.

Location: Hybrid work schedule in Mountain View or San Francisco, California; New York City, New York; or Kirkland, Washington. This role is based in the United States.

Salary: $213,000–$263,000 USD base salary per year, plus eligibility for an annual bonus, equity incentive plan, and company benefits.

Company

Waymo develops autonomous driving technology and operates a fully autonomous ride-hail service powered by the Waymo Driver.

What you will do

• Train and deploy state-of-the-art multimodal large language models and world models for 3D perception.
• Process camera, LiDAR, and radar data to support autonomous driving systems.
• Build scalable training and evaluation data pipelines from multiple sources.
• Design evaluation frameworks and optimize model training and inference throughput.
• Write production-quality code, unit tests, and documentation.
• Collaborate with partner and customer teams to deploy models into production.

Requirements

• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related technical field.
• At least 2 years of industry or postdoctoral research experience in reinforcement learning or foundation models.
• Experience implementing scalable, distributed, and performant model-training workflows, including data parallelism and FSDP.
• Hands-on experience with Transformer architectures and training ablation studies.
• Ability to work with complex globally distributed inference infrastructure.

Nice to have

• Extensive experience training and deploying computer vision models for 3D perception.
• Experience training or fine-tuning production-quality 3D multimodal models and encoders.
• Contributions to high-impact industry AI projects.
• Experience with generative models for world models, images, videos, or 3D using diffusion or autoregressive methods.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work environment with collaboration across research and engineering teams.
• Health, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• 401(k) with company match and paid time off.
• Paid holidays, sick time, maternity leave, and baby bonding leave.
• Eligibility for annual bonuses, equity incentives, and company benefits.