Machine Learning Engineer, Driver Understanding and Evaluation

Waymo; Mountain View (WY); Hybrid; USD 164,000 - 222,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

Equity incentives

Benefits package

Job summary

Waymo is seeking an experienced ML engineer to join the DUE team, helping to build scalable ML software and data systems for evaluating the Waymo Driver. You will contribute to ultra-realistic world simulation and production-ready evaluation tools that support hundreds of metrics and components.

The role emphasizes Python and modern ML frameworks, collaboration with research teams, and translating research into robust, production-scale solutions for autonomous driving.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience with ML software engineering.
• 3+ years of experience with Python.
• 3+ years of ML software experience with machine learning framework including PyTorch, TensorFlow, Jax/Flax.

Responsibilities

• Drive innovation in ultra-realistic world simulation for autonomous vehicles.
• Apply your deep Machine Learning (ML) expertise, in Generative AI (GenAI), to push the boundaries of simulation realism.
• Work with Waymo’s foundational AI research team to transfer research into scalable and production-ready solutions.

Skills

ML software engineering

Python

ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, J"

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX/Flax

Job description

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world’s most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World’s Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

The Driver Understanding and Evaluation (DUE) team at Waymo is developing rich metrics for understanding the behavior of the Waymo Driver in the real world, and technologies such as context and scene analysis to understand driving, understanding and augmenting real world driving data to generate rare driving events, build large scale data infrastructure, improve components such as agents and a realistic simulator. These technologies come together to drive the overall technical strategy and methodology used to evaluate the behavior of the Waymo Driver.

The DUE Machine Learning team will build and operate scalable machine learning and data systems, simulation workflow and insight tools, improve and speed up the evaluation and onboard developer journeys. It will combine expert human judgements and advanced machine learning models to deliver training and evaluation data for hundreds of metrics and components that make up the Waymo driver. We are looking for researchers and software engineers who are passionate about developing machine learning techniques for the Evaluation systems on our autonomous vehicles, and have an incessant drive to improve the performance of our technology stack.

You will:

• Drive innovation in ultra-realistic world simulation for autonomous vehicles. You will develop the latest simulation technologies using foundation models for embodied agents.
• Apply your deep Machine Learning (ML) expertise, in Generative AI (GenAI), to push the boundaries of simulation realism and directly influence the advancement of autonomous driving technology.
• Work with Waymo’s foundational AI research team to transfer research into scalable and production-ready solutions.

You have:

• 3+ years of experience with ML software engineering
• 3+ years of experience with Python
• 3+ years of ML software experience with machine learning framework including Pytorch, Tensorflow, Jax/Flax ,

We prefer:

• Experience working with, creating and/or developing ML models for robotics and/or self driving vehicles
• Strong C++ in production setting, with experience in integrating ML models in production system
• Experience in training large scale models on GPU/TPU clusters are strongly preferred

#LI-Hybrid

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is listed below. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level.

Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.

Salary Range

$170,000—$216,000 USD