Machine Learning Engineer, AI Foundations

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—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

The mission of the Waymo AI Foundations team is to develop machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving, towards the goal of safely operating Waymo vehicles in dozens of cities and under all driving conditions. As part of our work, we also initiate and foster collaborations with other research teams in Alphabet. AI Foundations areas that we are currently focusing on include reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, generative modeling, Bayesian inference, hierarchical learning, and robust evaluation.

This role follows a hybrid work schedule and you will report to a Senior Staff Software Engineer.

Responsibilities

• Work with a creative team of people who help to design, train, and evaluate the large-scale ML models that are used throughout Waymo’s systems, both onboard autonomous vehicles and offboard in simulation.
• Frame open-ended real-world problems as well-defined ML problems; develop and apply cutting-edge ML approaches (deep learning, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, etc) to these problems; scale them to Google-sized data pipelines; and streamline them to run in real-time on the cars.
• Collaborate with other teams including the ML infrastructure, data science and systems engineering teams, as well as various research teams such as Waymo Research, Google Brain, DeepMind and academia.

Qualifications

• Good programming skills - Python, JAX, TensorFlow/PyTorch
• Strong statistical / ML theoretical knowledge, and practical experience

Preferred qualifications

• 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 or imitation learning
• Autonomous driving experience

Compensation

The expected base salary range for this full-time position 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. 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 £93,000—£100,000 GBP