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.

You will:

• 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.

You have:

• Good programming skills - Python, JAX, TensorFlow/PyTorch


• Strong statistical / ML theoretical knowledge, and practical experience

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 or imitation learning


• Autonomous driving experience