Staff Machine Learning Engineer (TLM), Driver Understanding and Evaluation
This Staff-level role focuses on advancing Waymo’s autonomous driving systems by designing and optimizing machine learning models for driver understanding and evaluation, bridging human judgment with high-fidelity simulation and real-world data. The engineer will lead scalable systems to accelerate model iteration, improve developer onboarding, and enhance safety validation through advanced ML techniques.
Skills required
About this role
Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo’s 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 DUE Machine Learning team will build and operate scalable machine learning and data systems, simulation workflow and insight tools, improve and speed up the evaluation and onboard developer journeys. It will combine expert human judgements and advanced machine learning models to deliver training and evaluation data for hundreds of metrics and components that make up the Waymo driver.
We are planning to set up a team in London UK to work with the teams in MTV and Oxford to build these foundation models out and to integrate them into several evaluation and training products. We are looking for researchers and software engineers who are passionate about developing machine learning techniques for the Evaluation systems on our autonomous vehicles, and have an incessant drive to improve the performance of our technology stack.
In this hybrid role, you will report to an Engineering Manager.
You will:
- Be part of a world class research engineering team to grow the state-of-the-art of ultra realistic AV simulations using foundation models
- Collaborate with teams in Waymo Oxford to use large models to improve sim realism
- Design experiments that push the frontiers of AV simulations
- Develop metrics that measure the realism of simulated worlds
- Train and evaluate large models and integrate them into the simulator and its downstream applications
- Help hire outstanding research engineers from diverse backgrounds
- Be a part of a collaborative research engineering team that takes research ideas and productionizes them
- 1+ years of people management experience
We prefer:
- 7+ years experience in applied Deep Learning
- 7+ years coding and design skills
- Experience solving complex production problems using state-of-the-art ML techniques
- Experience taking research to production
- Expertise in Data Analysis or Data Science
The expected base salary range for this full-time position 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 Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.
Salary Range
£155,000—£163,000 GBP
