Machine Learning Engineer, Perception, Vision-Language Models

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 Semantics Onboard team is a specialized subgroup within the Perception organization at Waymo. Our mission is to bring the immense reasoning power and innate world knowledge of massive foundation models directly onto the Waymo Driver. We focus on building an onboard multi-task, multimodal perception model designed to tackle highly complex and unpredictable "long-tail" scenarios.

By leveraging advanced model distillation and quantization, we empower the autonomous system with zero-shot and few-shot generalization to adapt to rare edge cases safely and reliably. Our work is at the absolute cutting edge of autonomous safety, turning cloud-scale reasoning into real-time, onboard intelligence without sacrificing the strict computational and latency constraints of the vehicle.

You will:

• Architect and train large-scale, onboard ML perception models that are instrumental to ensuring vehicle safety and regulatory compliance.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration to engineer robust, high-reliability training pipelines within a dynamic, rapid-delivery environment.
• Leverage deep computer vision expertise to design novel, custom architectures from first principles to solve complex perception challenges.
• Contribute to a vibrant and positive team culture where diverse skill sets and backgrounds are valued.

You have:

• BS or MS in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field.
• Fluency in Python or C++, with deep hands-on expertise in PyTorch or Jax for matrix manipulation and module implementation.
• Deep understanding and proven practical experience with model distillation frameworks and quantization techniques for real-time compute constraints.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience building, training, or deploying Multimodal Foundation Models or Vision-Language Models (VLMs).

We prefer:

• PhD in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field.
• 2+ years of applied industry experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or complex ML systems.
• Hands-on experience managing and optimizing large-scale teacher-student training loops.
• A proven track record of successfully deploying Vision-Language queries in highly constrained, real-time environments.
• Experience with large-scale distributed training, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), or Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) for Foundation Models and VLMs.
• Deep expertise in long-context temporal reasoning for sequential decision-making or complex video understanding.
• First-author publications in premier computer vision and machine learning conferences, such as CVPR, NeurIPS, ICCV, or ECCV.

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.