Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Computer Vision/VLM

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.

In Semantics Foundation, our team's mission is to create the highest-fidelity, most comprehensive offboard perception autolabels at a massive scale, serving as the foundation for training and validating the AV stack. We are an advanced ML and engineering team that leverages state-of-the-art computer vision, deep learning, and generative AI to automatically analyze driving logs, generate rich scene understanding, and power the data engine that enables Waymo to scale safely and efficiently.

In this hybrid role, you will report to a Technical Lead Manager.

You will:

• Develop and train state-of-the-art computer vision / multimodal models (e.g., Gemini) to extract the rich semantic information (e.g., object attributes, scene properties, interaction dynamics) required by the AI agent.


• Design and implement a scalable AI agent framework that integrates large foundation models (e.g., Gemini) with the outputs of our perception models and internal knowledge bases.


• Develop and apply Fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to create a "data flywheel," continuously improving the system's captioning and reasoning abilities through automated feedback.


• Develop and prototype novel prompting strategies for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to elicit complex, causal reasoning about driving scenarios.


• Collaborate closely with the ML Infra, Perception, Behavior, and AI Foundation teams to define data requirements and integrate the captioning system into the broader ML development lifecycle.


• Own the full system lifecycle, from advanced model development and prototyping to production deployment and scaling for massive data generation

You have:

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a related technical field.


• 5+ years of hands-on experience training and shipping deep learning models for computer vision tasks (e.g., detection, segmentation, video understanding) using Python and frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.


• 1+ years of demonstrated experience working with large language models (LLMs) or vision-language models (VLMs) in areas such as fine-tuning, prompting, or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).


• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including designing scalable and reliable systems.


• Experience building and managing large-scale data processing pipelines for ML training.


• Proven ability to work autonomously and lead complex technical projects in a fast-paced R&D environment.

We prefer:

• PhD in Computer Science, or a related technical field.


• Publication record in top-tier AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR).


• Hands-on experience with Reinforcement Learning, especially RLHF, RLAIF, or applying RL to language/agentic tasks.


• Experience with modern techniques in self-supervised, weakly-supervised, or multi-task learning for perception.


• Experience building with AI agent frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex) or developing autonomous agentic systems.


• Familiarity with the challenges of multimodal perception in robotics or autonomous driving.


• A track record of impactful cross-functional collaboration.

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

$238,000—$302,000 USD