Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Perception LLM/VLM

About the Company

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and has provided over ten million rider-only trips.

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 for integrating multimodal data streams
• Develop and evaluate metrics for measuring performance and transferability of foundation models in autonomous driving
• Translate latest advancements in LLMs, VLMs, and continual learning into production-ready systems

Requirements

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

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience fine-tuning foundation models for autonomous driving or robotics
• Familiarity with large-scale data curation and quality assurance 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)
• PhD in a relevant field