Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Prediction & Planning - System Architecture

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the worlds most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver — The Worlds Most Experienced Driver — to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymos 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 Predictive Planning team (PrePlan) develops and deploys state-of-the-art machine learning solutions that predict the future state of the world and plan the Waymo Drivers behavior. Our mission is to transform Waymos unprecedented scale of driving data into robust, generalizable, and performant deep neural networks. These models enable the autonomous vehicle to navigate complex environments safely and efficiently.

The system architecture team handles the onboard contract of the model with the system, including kinematics, interfaces and representations. Our teams mission is to work across the stack, building the best setup for the model to drive. We tackle this through projects in data, modeling, metrics, and the overall planner system.

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

Responsibilities

Tackle challenging real-world problems with machine learning and engineering solutions.

Use state-of-the-art techniques to design and build machine learning models, deploy them in the real world on production vehicles.

Design and build the necessary architectures, algorithms, pipelines and evaluation systems on Googles extensive data infrastructure.

Collaborate with researchers, product area owners and engineers to develop safe, smooth planning behavior for all road users & deliver product requirements.

Qualifications

Bachelors in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, similar technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience.

Hands-on experience with modern deep learning libraries (e.g., TensorFlow, JAX, PyTorch).

Proficient programming skills (e.g., Python, C/C++).

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.

7+ years of experience in machine learning modeling and/or autonomous vehicles systems.

Preferred Qualifications

MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field.

Publications in top-tier conferences such as ICML, NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, IROS, CoRL, ACL, or EMNLP.

Prior software development or machine learning research industry experience (including internships).

General software engineering experience solving motion planning or related robotics problems.

Experience applying or evaluating ML-based systems in production environments.

Experience with performance optimization of deep models, including with respect to specific hardware architectures.

Benefits & Compensation
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. Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymos discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.

Salary Range: $250,750 — $318,600 USD