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 Semantics Understanding team is tackling the "last 1%" of autonomous driving perception. In this role, you will own the production modules related to Vehicle Understanding for the Waymo Driver. This area includes vehicles’ fine-grained classification (e.g., emergency, railed, construction, towing), states (e.g., warning, temporal blockage, active loading/unloading), and intents (e.g., lane-changes, stalled/slow, double-parking, unparking). Being on the critical path of Waymo’s domestic/international expansion, you will drive immediate impact and the 0-to-1 changes that push boundaries of the Waymo Driver’s generalizability.
In this hybrid role, you will report to our Senior Staff TLM of Semantics Understanding.
You Will:
- Lead a team responsible for a key production area to scale Waymo's business
- Develop a strong collaborative relationship with upstream and downstream teams to facilitate the end-to-end solutions for the corresponding product domains
- Exercise technical leadership by pushing the boundaries of onboard/offboard generalizability, e.g., by leveraging onboard/offboard multi-modal foundational models, large-scale 3rd party data, and partner teams in Research, Oracles, and Simulation.
- Manage a team (~10) with diverse skills including engineering, modeling, ML infrastructure, of senior and junior SWEs, foster an inclusive culture for sustained team growth, and hiring world-class talents.
- Collaborate with Platform/Infra partners to optimize the team’s key pipelines (e.g., data, training, evaluation, onboard) for high performance, efficiency, and reliability.
- Develop the execution strategies that balance short-term and long-term priorities. Drive process and clarify R&Rs for cross-organizational alignments.
You Have:
- BS/MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning or related disciplines
- 7+ years of experience in deep learning systems, specifically in computer vision, or multi-modal perception
- 3+ years of experience managing medium-sized (10+ people) production teams in complex, fast-paced environments with a track record in developing team culture and growing people.
- Experience in collaborating with technical, research and business stakeholders to drive impactful solutions.
We Prefer:
- PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning or related disciplines
- Publications in top CV conferences (NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, etc.)
- Experience in the autonomous vehicles industry
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.
Skills Required
- BS/MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning or related disciplines
- 7+ years of experience in computer vision and deep learning production systems in the autonomous driving vehicle space
- 3+ years of experience managing medium-sized production teams
- Experience collaborating with technical, research, and business stakeholders
Waymo Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Waymo and has not been reviewed or approved by Waymo.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is considered strong for full‑time technical roles, aligning with top‑tier AV/Big Tech benchmarks. Employer materials also emphasize competitive pay with eligibility for bonuses and equity as part of total rewards.
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Healthcare Strength — Coverage spans medical, dental, vision, mental‑health resources, onsite wellness centers, and counseling, with specialized programs such as menopause and transgender medical advocacy. Dependents are included, indicating depth across core health needs.
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Parental & Family Support — Offerings include fertility and family‑forming assistance, parental and baby‑bonding leave, caregiver and elder‑care support, and backup childcare. These programs are positioned to support families through multiple life stages.
Waymo Insights
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.
