Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Perception, LLM/VLM)

Waymo; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 204,000 - 259,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus program

Equity incentive plan

Generous benefits program

Job summary

A leading autonomous driving technology company in San Francisco is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to optimize and develop large-scale model training pipelines for foundation models. The ideal candidate has over 5 years of experience in Machine Learning, with strong expertise in LLM/VLM pre-training. This position offers a competitive salary range of $204,000 to $259,000 and additional benefits such as annual bonuses and equity incentives.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in Machine Learning, focusing on large-scale model development.
• Proven expertise in LLM/VLM pre-training and continual learning.
• Hands-on experience with model training and deployment.

Responsibilities

• Design and optimize large-scale continual pre-training pipelines for VLM foundation models.
• Conduct research on novel pre-training techniques for multimodal data streams.
• Develop metrics for evaluating performance and transferability of models.

Skills

Machine Learning

Large-scale model development

Python programming

Deep learning frameworks

Education

Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Jax

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Job description

Overview

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 Perception team builds the system which learns the spatial-temporal representation and their semantic meanings of the surrounding environment of the autonomously driving vehicle (ADV), i.e., the system that perceives the world around the car. We work jointly with downstream teams on the optimization and integration into the Waymo Driver. We conduct our own research to address real-world problems and collaborate with research teams at Alphabet. We have access to millions of miles of driving data from a diverse set of sensors, enabling engineers like you to (1) develop methods for efficiently and continuously learning from large scale real-world data, to (2) develop models and model training at scale, to (3) analyze real-world behavior and develop systems for handling the complexities of interacting with the real-world, and (4) optimize models for our onboard and offboard hardware.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and optimize large-scale continual pre-training pipelines for cutting-edge VLM foundation models.
• Conduct research and development on novel pre-training techniques, focusing on efficiently integrating new, diverse, and multimodal data streams (e.g., visual data from different sensors) into existing models.
• Develop and rigorously evaluate metrics and methodologies for measuring the performance, and transferability of continually pre-trained foundation models in the context of autonomous driving.
• Stay current with the latest advancements in large language models, vision-language models, and continual learning, and translate relevant research into production-ready systems.

You have

• 5+ years of experience in Machine Learning, with a focus on large-scale model development (LLM, VLM, or similar foundation models).
• Proven expertise in LLM/VLM pre-training, continual learning with large scale datasets.
• Strong coding proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (e.g., Jax, TensorFlow, PyTorch).
• Hands-on experience with model training, evaluation, and deployment in a production environment.
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

We prefer

• Experience in fine-tuning foundation models for autonomous driving or robotics applications
• Familiarity with large-scale data curation and quality assurance processes for multimodal datasets.
• Background in autonomous vehicle perception, motion planning, or decision-making systems.
• Publications in top-tier machine learning or computer vision conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV).
• PhD in a relevant field.

Salary and benefits

Salary Range: $204,000 — $259,000 USD

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.