Senior Software Engineer, Post-Training & RL Frameworks Waymo Mountain View, California

Neura Market; Mountain View (CA); Hybrid; USD 204,000 - 259,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary annual bonus

Equity incentive plan

Benefits program

Job summary

Waymo is hiring engineers to build ML systems that train and improve pre-trained models for the Waymo Driver, tackling reinforcement learning at unprecedented scales.

You will collaborate with researchers and modeling engineers to deploy RL techniques across CPU/GPU/TPU, design scalable training pipelines, and evaluate results.

This role offers hybrid work in the US and exposure to cutting-edge perception, planning, and world-model research.

Qualifications

• B.S. in Computer Science, Math, or 8+ years equivalent experience.
• Distributed systems design with ML efficiency.
• Experience with ML frameworks (TensorFlow, JAX, XLA).
• Proficient in Python and C++ with profiling skills.

Responsibilities

• Develop core training systems for RL at scale.
• Collaborate to integrate rollout strategies and RL algorithms.
• Improve end-to-end RL training pipeline and low-latency buffers.
• Build evaluations and iterate to improve model performance.
• Stay current with RL, VLA models, and World models.

Skills

Distributed systems design

ML frameworks experience

Python and C++

Profiling tools

Education

B.S. in Computer Science, Math or 8+ years experience

MS in Computer Science, Math

Tools

TensorFlow

JAX

XLA

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 Waymo ML Frameworks & Efficiency team partners with Research and Production teams across Waymo to develop models in Perception and Planning that are core to our autonomous driving software. We help our partners by offering the best frameworks for the entire model development lifecycle, including pre-training and post-training. They are geared towards both scaling models with efficiency and solving problems unique to ML for autonomous driving.

We are looking for engineers with ML system expertise to help us train and improve pre-trained models to be deployed into Waymo Driver, and potential future products. You'll work with researchers and modeling engineers across the company, and solve the challenges of large-scale reinforcement learning (RL), building systems that can scale across compute, data, and environments to improve model intelligence and understanding of human drivers.

You Will:

• Report into the Head of ML Frameworks & Efficiency
• Develop the core training system for adapting RL techniques to unprecedented scales and heterogeneous environments (i.e. CPU/GPU/TPU).
• Collaborate with teams to integrate the latest rollout strategies, policies, and RL algorithms (i.e. REINFORCE, DPO, PPO) into the system.
• Improve the end-to-end RL training pipeline for efficient and scalable learners/actors, and low-latency distributed reply buffers for persisting data produced by the rollouts.
• Build evaluations, analyze experimental results and iterate quickly to improve model performance and training workflows.
• Stay current with the latest research in RL, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, and World models to inform and inspire new programs.

You Have:

• B.S. in Computer Science, Math, or 8+ years equivalent real-world experience.
• Proficient in distributed systems design with an understanding of ML efficiency.
• Experience with ML frameworks, including TensorFlow, JAX, XLA.
• Solid programming skills in Python and C++.
• Practical familiarity with profiling tools to uncover performance bottlenecks.

We Prefer:

• MS in Computer Science, Math

Familiarity with post-training frameworks like TS/REX, Tunix, TorchRL, TRL.

#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. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the role location or, if the role can be performed remote, the specific salary range for your preferred location, during the hiring process.

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
• $204,000 — $259,000 USD