Staff Tech Lead, Machine Learning Engineer, Perception
Mountain View, California, San Francisco, California$251k - $310kFull-timePosted 3w ago
About the role
Staff Tech Lead, Machine Learning Engineer, Perception at Waymo leads multi-sensor, multi-task model development for dense scene understanding in autonomous driving, focusing on object detection, occupancy prediction, road understanding, and trajectory planning, with emphasis on scalable modeling libraries, latency/throughput optimization, and rapid prototyping in a hybrid on-site role.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design and development of multi-sensor, multi-task model architectures for dense and complete scene understanding with a focus on key tasks including object detection, occupancy prediction, road understanding, and trajectory planning.
- Architect and develop the foundational modeling libraries and software powering model development and experimentation.
- Design and implement scalable core model components, including sensor encoders, sensor fusion modules, backbones, and temporal aggregation / memory blocks.
- Adapt SOTA ML technologies to unique compute requirements, leading optimizations for latency, throughput, and memory to operate efficiently within strict compute budgets.
- Drive rapid prototyping by building and maintaining flexible pipelines and development environments for fast iteration on novel model designs, enabling seamless integration of field advancements and in-depth analysis of model training dynamics and learned representations.
Qualifications
- Bachelors in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of deep learning experience
- 7+ years experience in Machine Learning and/or Computer Vision
- Strong expertise in Python and C++ and a solid software engineering background
- Experience with ML frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, or Tensorflow
Skills
Required:Model architecture design for multi-sensor perceptionFoundational modeling libraries and software toolingSensor encoders, sensor fusion, backbones, temporal memoryLatency, throughput, memory optimization
Benefits
- Waymo employees are eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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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