Tech Lead Manager ML Optimization

The key responsibilities for this role include

• Technical Leadership: Proactively study the SOTA model architectures and optimizations from the community and Google, for World Models, Diffusion + flow matching techniques, and translate them into measurable technical deliverables in Waymo's onboard driving stack.
• Performance Analysis: Dev tooling innovation for model performance inspector in highly distributed training/inference setups, apply roofline analysis, understand the efficiency headrooms and drive work groups to deliver the optimizations and meet the system requirements.
• Strong Execution: Innovate high performance optimizations and tools for various models and large-scale training/inference including on future next-gen TPUs and low-bit precision training/inference setup, and ensure all system components align towards achieving high performance and goodput goals.
• Cross-Team Leadership: Guide efforts across multiple teams and organizations to ensure seamless integration of data generation, model development, and deployment pipelines.
• Mentorship & Management: Act as a mentor to junior engineers, helping to grow their technical expertise and foster a culture of collaboration and engineering excellence. Manage the IC performance for a medium size team of ~10 engineers.

You Have

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in machine learning infrastructure such as developing, training, deploying, and optimizing large-scale machine learning systems.
• Experienced using ML accelerator profiling tools to uncover performance bottlenecks.
• Solid experience in the development and optimization of machine learning infrastructure tools like DeepSpeed, PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, or similar frameworks.
• Deep understanding of state-of-the-art machine learning models and architectures such as autoregressive and diffusion transformers and familiarity with custom-kernels for diverse h/w compute based efficiency.
• Strong leadership skills with experience navigating cross-functional teams and providing technical leadership projects across multiple organizations.
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts for a broad audience.
• A Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field is preferred.

Pay and benefits

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 $298,000 - $378,000 USD