Director, AI Foundations & Data-Centric ML

Waymo; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 349,000 - 431,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary annual bonus

Equity incentive plan

Generous benefits program

Job summary

Waymo is seeking a senior leader for its AI Foundations team in a hybrid role in the United States. You will oversee World Model pre-training/post-training data recipes and build data flywheels from massive driving data to accelerate RL and foundation-model work.

You have 5+ years in reinforcement learning or foundation models, with publications or open-source contributions and a proven ability to lead research engineers to impact real-world AI systems.

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 - best practices around clustering, filtering, de-duplication, long-tail data mining, memorization, etc.
• Integrate emerging research from the broader community to do rigorous ablations and promising data research techniques. Focus on managing a team of scientists that would work on scaling ladders for pre-training, data mix optimizations and RL recipes (preferences) for post-training.
• Engage with the wider research community on best practices around data centric evaluation creation and refinement
• Partner with engineering and research teams across Waymo to share recipes, techniques, and post-training best practices to accelerate our collective know-how

Skills

Reinforcement Learning

Foundation Models

Data-centric AI

Team Leadership

Publications/Open-source

Education

PhD or Masters in CS/ML/Robotics

Job description

Waymo is seeking a senior leader for its AI Foundations team in a hybrid role in the United States. You will oversee World Model pre-training/post-training data recipes and build data flywheels from massive driving data to accelerate RL and foundation-model work.

You have 5+ years in reinforcement learning or foundation models, with publications or open-source contributions and a proven ability to lead research engineers to impact real-world AI systems.