Staff Machine Learning Engineer

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

• Provide deep technical leadership on large-scale ML model architectures for autonomous vehicles
• Build scalable systems for training and fine-tuning large-scale models to evaluate driving behaviors
• Work at the intersection of data engineering, model development, and simulation
• Design and scale large distributed systems covering the ML lifecycle, including dataset generation and model training
• Collaborate cross-functionally to translate product goals into measurable technical deliverables

Requirements

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a related field
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
• 3+ years in machine learning infrastructure (designing, scaling, training, and deploying large-scale systems)
• Experience with ML frameworks such as PyTorch, Jax, TensorFlow, or Ray
• Expertise in distributed training techniques and gradient sharding
• Deep understanding of state-of-the-art models like autoregressive transformers
• Strong leadership skills for navigating cross-functional teams

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
• 5+ years in machine learning infrastructure
• Experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or complex simulation environments
• Deep understanding of state-of-the-art RL techniques and fine-tuning from human feedback
• Familiarity with large-scale simulation platforms integrated with ML workflows
• Experience designing metrics for evaluating complex AI systems