Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Perception, Simulation Realism
Waymo · Mountain View, California, United States; San Francisco, California, United States
About this role
## Waymo — Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Perception, Simulation Realism ### About the Team: The “Oracle” for Autonomous Driving Waymo is building the **high-fidelity, platform-agnostic Ground Truth (GT) engine** that powers the next generation of autonomous vehicle (AV) simulation and evaluation. The team reprocesses onboard logs offline using state-of-the-art ML foundation models to generate semantic signals that outperform real-time onboard software. ### The Role Lead the **ML perception architecture** for Sim GroundTruth. You’ll serve as the **chief technical authority** for perception models, guiding and mentoring ML engineers to solve the “technical moat” of **high-fidelity 3D perception** and **ML inference at petabyte scale**. ### Key Responsibilities - **Scalable ML Architecture & Signal Expansion:** Architect a modular, extensible ML framework to absorb new signal requirements; transition from specialized models to **unified foundation model architectures** while maintaining “Oracle” quality. - **Strategic Ownership & Quality Leadership:** Own the multi-year roadmap for **signal quality, coverage, and reliability**, setting industry benchmarks for ground truth accuracy. - **ML Scale & Inference Efficiency:** Optimize high-fidelity perception model inference and compute efficiency across **petabyte-scale datasets**, partnering with infrastructure leads to support rigorous, high-frequency evaluation. - **Stakeholder & Ecosystem Growth:** Serve as the primary interface for **Application Owners**; translate simulation needs into technical requirements and ensure major software launches are “Oracle-validated.” - **Technical Leadership & Mentorship:** Mentor ML perception engineers; champion modeling best practices, architectural rigor, and execution on mission-critical **P0** perception initiatives. ### Requirements - **Education:** Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or related field (**PhD preferred**). - **Technical Leadership:** Proven track record setting technical vision, architecting complex ML systems, and mentoring senior engineers/research scientists. - **Cross-Stakeholder Alignment:** Ability to gather requirements across diverse customers and align them into a unified technical roadmap; negotiate R&R across competing priorities. - **Technical Depth:** Hands-on ability to lead ICs daily, with deep knowledge of codebases, eval/data pipelines, and model architectures. - **ML & Perception Expertise:** Deep understanding of **foundation models** (VLMs or MMLMs) and CV/perception architectures (e.g., Transformers, 3D detection, scene reconstruction), including post-training, fine-tuning, and/or inference-time scaling. - **Proficiency:** Expert-level **Python**, **NumPy**, and deep learning frameworks (**PyTorch or JAX**). ### Preferred Qualifications - **Systems Engineering:** Experience building/scaling distributed systems or data pipelines at **petabyte scale**. - **Object Detection & AV Perception:** Expertise in **2D/3D object detection**, multi-modal sensor fusion (camera, LiDAR), tracking, and offboard ground-truth generation. - **Software Rigor:** Proficiency in **C++** and experience with production-grade ML deployment. - **Academic Impact:** Strong publication record (CVPR, ICRA, NeurIPS) or leadership in major open-source projects. ### Compensation (US) - **Base salary range:** **$298,000 — $368,000 USD** - Waymo employees may also be eligible for **discretionary annual bo
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