Tech Lead Manager ML Optimization

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

• Take ownership of improving model efficiency on different platforms and drive model system codesign practices
• Study SOTA model architectures and optimizations for World Models and Diffusion + flow matching techniques
• Innovate dev tooling for model performance inspection in highly distributed training/inference setups
• Apply roofline analysis to understand efficiency headrooms and drive optimization work groups
• Innovate high performance optimizations for large-scale training/inference including next-gen TPUs and low-bit precision setups
• Guide efforts across multiple teams to ensure seamless integration of data generation, model development, and deployment pipelines
• Manage IC performance for a medium size team of approximately 10 engineers and mentor junior staff

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
• 5+ years in machine learning infrastructure (developing, training, deploying, and optimizing large-scale ML systems)
• Experience using ML accelerator profiling tools to uncover performance bottlenecks
• Solid experience with ML infrastructure tools like DeepSpeed, PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX
• Deep understanding of SOTA ML models such as autoregressive and diffusion transformers
• Familiarity with custom-kernels for diverse hardware compute efficiency
• Strong leadership skills navigating cross-functional teams
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field