Staff Machine Learning Engineer (VLM/LLM)

Location: Hybrid work schedule with office locations in Mountain View, San Francisco, or New York City, United States

Salary: $238,000–$302,000 USD per year

Company

Waymo develops autonomous driving technology, including the Waymo Driver and fully autonomous ride-hail services.

What you will do

• Build foundation models used onboard autonomous vehicles and in simulation.
• Lead end-to-end evaluation systems and benchmarks for foundation models.
• Evaluate the quality, safety, and realism of embodied AI agents across pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning.
• Partner across organizations to bring innovative machine learning technology into production.
• Implement and extend large-scale data and evaluation pipelines.

Requirements

• Master’s or PhD degree in Computer Science, a similar technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in machine learning engineering and applied deep learning.
• Strong portfolio of shipped products or publication record.
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems.
• Proficiency in Python and C/C++.
• Strong analytical and debugging skills.

Nice to have

• ML infrastructure experience, including training, evaluating, and deploying models at scale.
• Experience with generative models such as LLMs/VLMs or reinforcement learning.
• In-depth knowledge of an ML framework such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.

Culture & Benefits

• Health, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• 401(k) retirement plan with company match.
• 20 vacation days per year, plus paid holidays and sick time.
• Maternity leave and baby bonding leave.
• Eligibility for annual bonus and equity incentive programs.