Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Perception, Simulation Realism
About The Position
Waymo is hiring a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the perception architecture for Sim GroundTruth. The role sits at the intersection of perception machine learning research, foundation models, and large-scale offline data engineering. The engineer will be the senior technical authority for perception models, guiding and mentoring engineers as they develop high-fidelity 3D perception and machine-learning inference at petabyte scale. The team builds a high-fidelity, platform-agnostic Ground Truth engine for autonomous-vehicle simulation and evaluation. It reprocesses onboard logs offline using machine-learning foundation models to generate semantic signals that outperform real-time onboard software. The team is scaling this system to support large-scale evaluation and increasingly rigorous simulation. The role includes defining the technical roadmap for signal quality, coverage, and reliability; evolving specialized models toward unified foundation-model architectures; optimizing inference and compute efficiency; working with application owners across the company to translate simulation needs into technical requirements; and providing technical leadership and mentorship for mission-critical perception initiatives.
Requirements
- Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field; a PhD is preferred.
- Proven senior technical leadership, including setting technical vision, architecting complex machine-learning systems, and mentoring senior engineers and research scientists.
- Experience gathering requirements from diverse customers in complex organizations and aligning them into a unified technical roadmap, including negotiating roles and responsibilities across competing priorities.
- Hands-on technical depth to lead individual contributors daily, including deep knowledge of codebases, evaluation and data pipelines, and model architectures.
- Deep understanding of foundation models (VLMs or MMLMs) and computer-vision or perception architectures, such as Transformers, 3D detection, and scene reconstruction, particularly in post-training, fine-tuning, or inference-time scaling.
- Expert-level proficiency in Python, NumPy, and deep-learning frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building and scaling distributed systems or data pipelines at petabyte scale.
- Deep expertise in 2D and 3D object detection, multimodal sensor fusion (camera and LiDAR), tracking, and offboard ground-truth generation for autonomous vehicles.
- Proficiency in C++ and experience with production-grade machine-learning deployment.
- Strong publication record at top-tier conferences such as CVPR, ICRA, or NeurIPS, or leadership in major open-source projects.
Responsibilities
- Architect a modular, extensible machine-learning framework that can absorb growing and complex signal requirements.
- Lead the transition from specialized models to unified foundation-model architectures while maintaining signal quality and scaling to hundreds of semantic categories.
- Define the multi-year roadmap for signal quality, coverage, and reliability, with the goal of setting a benchmark for ground-truth accuracy.
- Optimize high-fidelity perception-model inference and compute efficiency across petabyte-scale datasets, working with backend infrastructure leads.
- Serve as the primary interface for application owners across the company, translating simulation needs into technical requirements and expanding adoption of Oracle validation.
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to machine-learning perception engineers, championing modeling best practices and architectural rigor.
- Drive technical execution on mission-critical P0 perception initiatives.
- Technically lead individual contributors through hands-on knowledge of codebases, evaluation and data pipelines, and model architectures.
- Align customer requirements and competing priorities into a unified technical roadmap, negotiating roles and responsibilities across stakeholders.
Benefits
- Discretionary annual bonus program
- Equity incentive plan
- Company benefits program
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
