Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Sensor Validation

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.

Software Engineering builds the brains of Waymo's fully autonomous driving technology. Our software allows the Waymo Driver to perceive the world around it, make the right decision for every situation, and deliver people safely to their destinations. We think deeply and solve complex technical challenges in areas like robotics, perception, decision-making and deep learning, while collaborating with hardware and systems engineers. If you’re a software engineer or researcher who’s curious and passionate about Level 4 autonomous driving, we'd like to meet you.

Within Perception, the Sensor Health team's job is to make sure that sensors "just work" for the entire self-driving car software stack. We make sure that all sensors are properly calibrated and consistently monitored at all times. We are often the firsts to algorithmically process data from next-generation sensors on next-generation vehicle platforms and work closely with both hardware and software teams to provide the best possible sensor data from our many sensors perfectly aligned to our upstream customers. To this end, we develop sensor data alignment and calibration algorithms, a growing sensor health backend, and deploy our systems both into the Waymo Driver and our log processing backend.

This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to a Technical Lead Manager.

You will:

• Develop and implement state-of-the-art sensor validation algorithms for analyzing the health of our sensor suites

• Implement onboard fault detection, isolation, and recovery solutions using cutting edge ML approaches

• Work on sensor fusion algorithms that scale for heterogeneous sensor and multi-platform systems

• Develop a data flywheel approach to automatically scale sensor validation approaches

• Work with in-house hardware and perception teams on novel sensing modalities and next-generation perception solutions

You have:

• MS in Computer Science, Robotics, Math, Physics or equivalent industry experience

• 5+ years of experience in Machine Learning, with a strong focus on deep learning for perception tasks.

• Deep understanding of multiple sensing modality principles to work with laser, radar, and image products

• Strong C++ skills and ability to write high quality production level code.

• Experience with Python

• Experience with ML frameworks like PyTorch or JAX

• Familiarity with machine learning techniques applied to sensor fusion, sensor calibration, or positioning problems.

We prefer:

• PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Math, Physics or equivalent industry experience

• Experience developing and using tools for large-scale data analysis and visualization (e.g., SQL, Python with libraries like NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib).

• Publications at top-tier conferences like CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, ICRA, IROS, RSS, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCV, PAMI

• Experience in the autonomous vehicle (AV) or robotics industry, particularly with real-time on-device perception systems.

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