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 Waymo ML Frameworks & Efficiency team partners closely with Research and Production teams across Waymo to develop and deploy models in Perception and Planning that are core to our autonomous driving software. We help our partners by offering the best frameworks for the entire model development lifecycle, including pre-training and post-training. They are geared towards both scaling models with efficiency and solving problems unique to ML for autonomous driving.
We are looking for engineers with ML system expertise to help us train and improve pre-trained models to be deployed into Waymo Driver, and potential future products. You’ll work closely with researchers and modeling engineers across the company, and tackle the challenges of large-scale reinforcement learning (RL), building systems that can scale across compute, data, and environments to improve model intelligence and alignment with human drivers.
You Will:
- Develop the core training system for adapting RL techniques to unprecedented scales and heterogeneous environments (i.e. CPU/GPU/TPU).
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate cutting-edge rollout strategies, policies, and RL algorithms (i.e. REINFORCE, DPO, PPO, etc.) into the system.
- Optimize the end to end RL training pipeline for efficient and scalable learners/actors, and low-latency distributed reply buffers for persisting data produced by the rollouts.
- Build robust evaluations, analyze experimental results and iterate quickly to improve model performance and training workflows.
- Stay current with the latest research in RL, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, and World models to inform and inspire new initiatives.
You Have:
- B.S. in Computer Science, Math, or 8+ years equivalent real-world experience.
- Proficient in distributed systems design with an understanding of ML efficiency.
- Experience with ML frameworks, including TensorFlow, JAX, XLA.
- Solid programming skills in Python and C++.
- Practical familiarity with profiling tools to uncover performance bottlenecks.
We Prefer:
- MS in Computer Science, Math
- Familiarity with post-training frameworks like TS/REX, Tunix, TorchRL, TRL, etc.
The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations 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. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the role location or, if the role can be performed remote, the specific salary range for your preferred location, during the hiring process.
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.
Top Skills
What We Do
Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to move around. With the Waymo Driver, we can improve the world’s mobility while saving thousands of lives.
Waymo reaches out to candidates from official channels only (e.g. directly from @waymo.com email addresses, or through our recruiters or sourcers who are noted as such on LinkedIn). We do not contact candidates about career opportunities through instant messaging apps like Telegram, email addresses from domains other than waymo.com (such as Gmail addresses), direct messages on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, or text messages. Visit waymo.com to check out our official job listings.
