Senior Machine Learning Engineer, LLM/VLM Visual Reasoning

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 Staff Research Scientist.

You will:

• Design and implement cutting-edge models and algorithms for spatial-temporal visual reasoning in autonomous driving scenarios, utilizing large language and vision models (LLM/VLM).

• Develop and maintain robust training and evaluation pipelines for VLM models, focusing on metrics relevant to decision-making rationale and free-form question answering.

• Collaborate with ML engineers and researchers to integrate visual reasoning capabilities into product systems.

• Lead the effort to set up proper large-scale rationale/QA data and establish rigorous evaluation metrics for visual reasoning tasks.

• Explore and implement advanced techniques, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), to optimize model performance for complex visual reasoning challenges.

• Analyze and interpret large-scale sensor data to identify key challenges and opportunities for improving LLM/VLM performance in real-world driving environments.

You have:

• 5+ years of experience in Machine Learning, with a focus on large-scale model development (LLM, VLM, or similar foundation models).

• Proven expertise in visual reasoning, scene understanding, or related areas within autonomous driving, robotics, or computer vision.

• Strong coding proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (e.g., Jax, TensorFlow, PyTorch).

• Hands-on experience with model training, evaluation, and deployment in a production environment.

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

We prefer:

• Experience with advanced training techniques, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning (RL) for language/vision models.

• Familiarity with large-scale data curation and quality assurance processes for multimodal datasets (e.g., rationale/QA data).

• Background in autonomous vehicle perception, motion planning, or decision-making systems.

• Publications in top-tier machine learning or computer vision conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV).

• PhD in a relevant field.

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
$204,000—$259,000 USD