Staff ML Engineer, Foundation Models

Woven by Toyota is enabling Toyota’s once-in-a-century transformation into a mobility company. Inspired by a legacy of innovating for the benefit of others, our mission is to challenge the current state of mobility through human-centric innovation — expanding what “mobility” means and how it serves society.

Our work centers on four pillars: AD/ADAS, our autonomous driving and advanced driver assist technologies; Arene, our software development platform for software-defined vehicles; Woven City, a test course for mobility; and Cloud & AI, the digital infrastructure powering our collaborative foundation. Business-critical functions empower these teams to execute, and together, we’re working toward one bold goal: a world with zero accidents and enhanced well-being for all.

THE TEAM
At Woven by Toyota, we work on a diverse set of problems ranging from solving optimization problems in 3D geometric computer vision to designing and deploying novel ML architectures for perception, prediction, and motion planning for Toyota customers. We are looking for doers and creative problem solvers to join us in improving mobility for everyone with self-driving technology. You will be interacting on a daily basis with other software and hardware engineers and researchers to tackle some of the most challenging problems in AI, robotics, and computer vision.

WHO ARE WE LOOKING FOR?
The AD/ADAS team is seeking a seasoned ML engineer to support the development of foundation models for our autonomy stack. You will be responsible for curating the right multi-modal data, identifying the most suitable model architectures, steering towards the best training paradigms, optimizing the infrastructure for the highest utilization, and ultimately focusing on efficient deployment for onboard and offboard use cases. Fortunately, you will be doing this with a world-class team of exceptional engineers.

We recognize the unique capabilities each team member brings and encourage applicants to reach out even if they do not match all of the characteristics described below.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
• Lead the roadmap, research, development, and deployment of foundation models / VLAs / VLMs / world models for our autonomy stack across a variety of applications
• Discover new ways to leverage heterogeneous in-house data at Toyota scale
• Architect and implement efficient, large-scale distributed ML pipelines for training and fine-tuning, as well as pre/post-training of large multi-modal, multi-task models
• Design experiments and benchmarks to evaluate foundation models for autonomy scenarios
• Optimize models for speed, accuracy, and robustness under diverse environmental conditions
• Translate cutting-edge research into useful production-ready solutions
• Enable and help other engineers on the team to be more effective through coaching and leading by example when it comes to writing high-quality code, providing high-quality code and design
• Work in a high-velocity environment and employ agile development practices
• Team player and “get things done” mentality
• Closely collaborate with internal and external teams to develop end-to-end solutions

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:
• M.Sc. or higher degree in CS/CE/EE, or equivalent industry experience.
• 8+ years of experience with popular ML frameworks such as PyTorch or similar (e.g. JAX)
• 6+ years of experience in efficient ML training & deployment workflows: data sampling and sharding, pre-processing, distributed training and parallelism approaches, model training, evaluation & ablation, inference optimization
• Prior proven experience in training and deploying state-of-the-art large foundation models leveraging large-scale data
• Strong programming skills in Python and C++
• Passionate about advancing self driving technology for the mass market
• Strong communication skills and ability to communicate concepts clearly and precisely
• Experience in production-level software development best practices.

NICE TO HAVES:
• Hands-on experience with building a perception stack for autonomous systems
• Experience in runtime optimization for Linux and UNIX-like real-time operating systems
• Publications at major conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICRA, NeurIPS etc.
• Experience with embedded CUDA development and related tooling
• Experience with automotive-grade edge-compute platforms and safety-critical software

The base pay for this position ranges from $161,000- $264,500 a year.

Your base salary is one part of your total compensation. We offer a base salary, short term and long term incentives, and a comprehensive benefits package. The total compensation offered to an employee will be dependent upon the individual's skills, experience, qualifications, location, and level.

WHAT WE OFFER
We are committed to creating a modern work environment that supports our employees and their loved ones. We offer many options of the best programs to allow you to do your most meaningful work and to help you shape the future of mobility.
・Excellent health, wellness, dental and vision coverage
・A rewarding 401k program
・Flexible vacation policy
・Family planning and care benefits

Our Commitment
・We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity.
・Any information we receive from you will be used only in the hiring and onboarding process. Please see our privacy notice for more details.