Staff ML Engineer: Vision-Language Foundations & Data-Flywheel

Waymo; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 251,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary annual bonus

Equity incentive plan

Generous Company benefits program

Job summary

Waymo, a leader in autonomous driving technology, seeks a senior leader to drive large-scale multimodal model development. You will guide pre-training, data curation, and extensive post-training improvements to enhance reasoning and safety.

Your role includes architecting scalable training pipelines and mentoring engineers across ML Infra, Perception, and AI Foundations teams. You will shape long-term roadmaps, influence architecture, and push the boundaries of foundation models to support Waymo

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in CS/AI/ML or related field.
• 8+ years designing and scaling deep learning models.
• 3+ years focused on LLMs or VLMs.
• Experience with foundation models from pre-training to post-training.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals for scalable ML systems.

Responsibilities

• Drive pre-training & data strategies for multimodal models.
• Lead post-training & RLHF/RLAIF pipelines to improve reasoning.
• Architect scalable inference and evaluation for Gemini-class models.
• Define training recipes and scaling laws for large clusters.
• Lead cross-functional AI strategy across multiple teams.
• Provide staff-level technical leadership and mentorship.

Skills

LLM training

VLM training

Large-scale training

Python

PyTorch

JAX

Distributed training

Leadership

Education

Master’s degree in Computer Science/AI/ML

PhD preferred

Tools

Python

PyTorch

JAX

Megatron

FSDP

Job description

Waymo, a leader in autonomous driving technology, seeks a senior leader to drive large-scale multimodal model development. You will guide pre-training, data curation, and extensive post-training improvements to enhance reasoning and safety.

Your role includes architecting scalable training pipelines and mentoring engineers across ML Infra, Perception, and AI Foundations teams. You will shape long-term roadmaps, influence architecture, and push the boundaries of foundation models to support Waymo