Staff Machine Learning Engineer - VLM/LLM

You will

• Work with a creative team of people who help to build the state-of-the-art Foundation Models that are used throughout Waymo's systems, both onboard autonomous vehicles and offboard in simulation
• Lead the development of end-to-end evaluation systems and benchmarks for Waymo Foundation models, encompassing the entire lifecycle from pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL), for evaluating the quality, safety, and realism of embodied AI agents
• Partner within and across organizations to land disruptive and innovative tech in production
• Implement and extend large large scale data and evaluation pipelines

You have

• Master's degree or PhD degree in Computer Science, similar technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of experience in ML engineering and applied Deep Learning, with a strong portfolio of shipped products or publication record
• Experience with large scale distributed system
• Proficient programming skills (eg: Python, C/C++)
• Strong analytical and debugging skills

We prefer

• ML infra experience: training, evaluating and deploying ML models at scale
• Deep learning experience, especially with generative models, e.g., LLMs/VLMs, and/or reinforcement learning
• Proficiency and in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of an ML framework (e.g. Pytorch, JAX, Tensorflow)

Pay and benefits

In accordance with Washington state law, we are highlighting our comprehensive benefits package, which is available to all eligible US based employees. Benefits for this role include:

• Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance
• Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match
• Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment
• Sick Time: 40 hours/year (statutory, where applicable); 5 days/event (discretionary)
• Maternity Leave (Short-Term Disability + Baby Bonding): 28-30 weeks
• Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks
• Holidays: 13 paid days per year

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is listed below. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the role location or, if the role can be performed remote, the specific salary range for your preferred location, during the hiring process.

Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo's discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.

Salary Range $238,000 - $302,000 USD