Director of AI Foundations, Foundation Model Evaluation & Integration

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 the Vice President, AI Foundations.

You will:

• Be accountable for the productive integration of the Foundation Model Teacher setups developed by the AIF and ML Infra teams into customer student team frameworks, and for maintaining these integrations

• Working with customers to understand their needs and working backwards from those needs

• Optimize the teacher / student model distillation process, model inference footprints and sampling techniques to fit compute constraints

• Define and implement metrics and evaluation infrastructure necessary for evaluating Waymo Foundation Models

• Develop frameworks and approaches that power data ‘Data Flywheel‘ mining and annotation applications using Foundation Models training and evaluation, using Waymo data and also third party data

You have:

• Machine learning expertise, with a track record of contributing to large scale ML production systems and their development cycle

• Software engineering infrastructure experience. Technical ability to dive deep into complex systems, infrastructure, algorithms, and modeling techniques

• Experience with evaluating and optimizing large scale ML / AI systems

• Experience of leading engineering teams of 10+

• Hired and developed world class managers and scientists

• Strong communication and planning skills (e.g. building 12 month roadmaps)

• Strong cross-organization collaboration skills

We prefer:

• Direct experience developing large pre-trained foundational models (LLM / VLM / Video models)

• Experience across multiple ML applications (e.g. natural language processing and vision) in multiple settings (e.g. founded a successful startup and lead a significant team at a FAANG company)

• Has experience with the dev-ops side of ML models (e.g. model training latency, regression prevention)

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
$332,000—$421,000 USD