Director, AI Foundations & Data-Centric ML

Neura Market; Mountain View (CA); Hybrid; USD 349,000 - 431,000; Full time

Job summary

Waymo is seeking a senior researcher to lead data-centric AI initiatives within the AI Foundations team. You will guide Foundation World Model data pipelines, drive data quality and scale using Waymo’s extensive driving data, and mentor researchers and engineers in deploying impactful AI solutions.

The role requires a PhD or Masters with 5+ years in RL or Foundation Models, publications, and strong leadership experience. The position offers a hybrid work model and competitive compensation.

Qualifications

• PhD or Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a similar technical field; with 5+ years of industry or post-doc research experience in Reinforcement Learning or Foundation Models.
• Demonstration of original contributions to the field through high-impact publications (ArXiv, peer-reviewed conferences like NeurIPS/ICLR/CVPR), technical blog posts, or significant open-source contributions.
• Experience leading teams of research scientists and engineers to deploy real world impact in AI - including showing real world impact. Ability to be hands-on when needed to adapt models as and when needed.

Responsibilities

• Participate in Waymo’s Foundation World Model pre-training and post-training by owning the data recipe
• Invest in data best practices - clustering, filtering, de-duplication, long-tail data mining, memorization, etc. Lead a team of research engineers to build the data flywheel from Waymo’s driving data
• Integrate emerging research to perform rigorous ablations and data research techniques. Manage a team of scientists for scaling ladders for pre-training, data mix optimizations and RL recipes for post-training
• Engage with the broader researchers on data centric evaluation creation and refinement
• Partner with engineering and research teams across Waymo to share recipes and post-training best practices to accelerate know-how

Skills

Leadership

Publications

Hands-on AI

Education

PhD or Masters in CS/ML/Robotics

Tools

Foundation Models

Job description

Waymo is seeking a senior researcher to lead data-centric AI initiatives within the AI Foundations team. You will guide Foundation World Model data pipelines, drive data quality and scale using Waymo’s extensive driving data, and mentor researchers and engineers in deploying impactful AI solutions.

The role requires a PhD or Masters with 5+ years in RL or Foundation Models, publications, and strong leadership experience. The position offers a hybrid work model and competitive compensation.