Staff ML Engineer — Hybrid 3D Perception & Multimodal

Waymo; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 251,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, vision

401(k) with company match

Paid Time Off

Sick Time

Maternity Leave

Baby Bonding Leave

Holidays

Job summary

Waymo is seeking a research scientist for its AI Foundations team to advance training and deployment of multimodal models used for 3D perception. You will work across data pipelines, model distillation, and large-scale inference across distributed infrastructure.

The role requires a PhD or Masters in CS/ML/Robotics with 4+ years of RL or foundation models experience, and hands-on skill in JAX/Flax, TensorFlow or PyTorch. This is a hybrid position with collaboration across Waymo's global teams.

Qualifications

• PhD or Masters in CS/ML/Robotics with 4+ years of research experience in Reinforcement Learning or Foundation Models.
• Proficiency in implementing scalable training/inference for distributed architectures.
• Strong experience with JAX, Flax and TensorFlow or PyTorch.

Responsibilities

• Conduct comprehensive experimentation to train and deploy state-of-the‑art Multimodal LLMs and World models for 3D Perception using camera, LiDAR, and Radar data.
• Collaborate with engineering and research teams to deploy models and streamline training on fresh data.
• Develop and apply techniques like quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation, and efficient attention.

Skills

JAX/Flax

Transformer optimization

Distributed training

TensorFlow/PyTorch

Education

PhD or Masters in CS/ML/Robotics

Tools

Data parallel

FSDP

XLA / acceleration

Job description

Waymo is seeking a research scientist for its AI Foundations team to advance training and deployment of multimodal models used for 3D perception. You will work across data pipelines, model distillation, and large-scale inference across distributed infrastructure.

The role requires a PhD or Masters in CS/ML/Robotics with 4+ years of RL or foundation models experience, and hands-on skill in JAX/Flax, TensorFlow or PyTorch. This is a hybrid position with collaboration across Waymo's global teams.