Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, LLM/VLM Model Architecture & Optimization

About the Company

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 to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives.

Responsibilities

• Design VLM/LLM model architecture and drive strong alignment between model architectures and hardware architectures
• Optimize model performance for on-device use cases including memory, power, and compute constrained environments
• Engage directly with research, software engineering, hardware engineering, and product teams to deliver end-to-end solutions

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in Machine Learning with a focus on large-scale model development (LLM, VLM, or similar foundation models)
• Proven expertise in low-latency on-device inference techniques and hardware acceleration
• Extensive experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX
• Experience applying foundation models in complex, safety-critical domains like autonomy or robotics
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Preferred Qualifications

• 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