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Staff Machine Learning Engineer – VLM/LLM

Waymo· AI Foundations
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Mountain View, CA, San Francisco, CA, New York, NY$238k - $302kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Staff ML Engineer focused on foundation models (VLM/LLM) within Waymo AI Foundations, leading end-to-end evaluation systems and benchmarks for foundation models, and advancing scalable data/evaluation pipelines for embodied AI agents in Waymo’s autonomous driving platform.

Responsibilities

  • Work with a creative team of people who help to build the state-of-the-art Foundation Models that are used throughout Waymo’s systems, both onboard autonomous vehicles and offboard in simulation
  • Lead the development of end-to-end evaluation systems and benchmarks for Waymo Foundation models, encompassing the entire lifecycle from pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL), for evaluating the quality, safety, and realism of embodied AI agents
  • Partner within and across organizations to land disruptive and innovative tech in production
  • Implement and extend large scale data and evaluation pipelines

Qualifications

  • Master’s degree or PhD degree in Computer Science, similar technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience
  • 5+ years of experience in ML engineering and applied Deep Learning, with a strong portfolio of shipped products or publication record
  • Experience with large scale distributed system
  • Proficient programming skills (eg: Python, C/C++)
  • Strong analytical and debugging skills

Skills

Required:Foundation model evaluationDistributed systemsProgramming (Python, C/C++)

Benefits

  • 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
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Waymo

The World’s Most Experienced Driver

Waymo—formerly the Google self-driving car project—makes it safe and easy for people & things to get around with autonomous vehicles.

Autonomous DrivingAutonomous VehiclesMobilityRide-Hailliquid-ai-recruiting-target
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