Senior Software Engineer, Perception, VLM Foundation

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Mountain View, CA
In-Office
204K-259K Annually
Automotive
The 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.

Semantics Foundation is a model platform team in Waymo Perception, and we build model platforms for other problem domain teams to use for addressing production issues. In this role, you will work on VLM for driving focusing on model pre-training, fine-tuning, and post-training, for Waymo applications.

In this hybrid role, you will report to the Technical Lead Manager of Semantics Foundation.

You will:

  • Tackle long-tail scenarios and develop evaluation framework to support launching vision language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs)
  • Explore leveraging VLM's world knowledge and reasoning capabilities to improve various driving tasks
  • Work on different phases of model development from data mining, training and eval, and deploy the models on the autonomous vehicles
  • Collaborate and work in partnership with research teams across Alphabet

You have:

  • BS degree in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of deep learning experience
  • 6+ years of industry or research experience with deep Learning, VLM/LLMs, and/or computer vision
  • 6+ years of experience with Python
  • Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks such as Jax, PyTorch, Tensorflow

We prefer:

  • Experience with training large VLM/LLMs with distributed training
  • Experience with model optimization
  • Experience of modeling with real-world sensor data (cameras, LIDAR, radars)
  • Publications on top-tier conferences like CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, IJCV, PAMI
  • Experience with C++

#LI-hybrid

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. 

Salary Range
$204,000$259,000 USD

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The Company
Mountain View, CA
2,359 Employees
Year Founded: 2009

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.

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