Senior ML Engineer, Perception Research

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 reports to a Principal Research Scientist.

You will:

• Conduct comprehensive experimentation to train and deploy state-of-the-art Multimodal LLMs and World models to perform 3D Perception using sensor information from Camera, LiDAR and Radar.
• Write high quality code, unit tests, and documentation
• Collaborate effectively with partner and customer teams to deploy models to production
• Develop and maintain scalable data pipelines for Training & Eval to process data from multiple sources.
• Design and implement evaluation frameworks for perception models.
• Implement efficient training & inference optimization methods to maximize throughput
• Hands-on experience with Transformer architectures with in-depth knowledge on training ablations.

You have:

• PhD or Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a similar technical field, with 2+ years of industry or post-doc research experience in Reinforcement Learning or Foundation Models. 
• Proficiency in implementing model training flows in a scalable, distributed and performant manner such as Data parallel, FSDP and other sharding approaches. 
• A willingness to work with complexity of globally distributed inference infrastructure.

We prefer:

• Extensive experience training and deploying Computer Vision models to solve 3D perception tasks.
• Hands-on experience in training/fine-tuning production-quality 3D Multimodal models and respective encoders.
• Substantial involvement in and contributions to high impact industry AI projects.
• Experience in generative models for domains such as world models, images, videos, 3D, using techniques such as diffusion or autoregressive models.

Disclosure for WA Based & Remote Roles:

In accordance with Washington state law, we are highlighting our comprehensive benefits package, which is available to all eligible US based employees. Benefits for this role include:

Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment Sick Time: 40 hours/year (statutory, where applicable); 5 days/event (discretionary) Maternity Leave (Short-Term Disability + Baby Bonding): 28-30 weeks Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks Holidays: 13 paid days per year