Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Waymo
AI Infrastructure
$251-310k
Autonomous driving technology
Posted today
Autonomous driving technology
1001+ employees
Posted today
$251-310k
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make it simpler and safer for people to move things and themselves around.
Role
Who you are
- B.S. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- 7+ years of hands-on experience building machine learning systems
- Experience designing, scaling, training, deploying, and optimizing large-scale ML systems from data to model
- Strong coding experience in Python and/or C++
- Experience with ML frameworks such as JAX, TensorFlow, or PyTorch, including both the user-facing APIs and their internals
- Proven ability to set technical direction and influence partner teams in ambiguous problem spaces
Desirable
- M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field with a specialization in machine learning
- 10+ years of hands-on experience building production machine learning systems
- Experience serving ML models in production at scale, including low-latency inference on accelerators (TPU/GPU), SLOs, and safe model rollouts
- Technical leadership in serving production-quality models, including owning launches, reliability, and on-call for services that other teams depend on
- Experience with distributed training and accelerator performance profiling
- Experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or large-scale simulation
What the job involves
- Lead the design and development of ML infrastructure that takes DUE models from data to training to production serving, including event detection models, triage foundation models, and agents
- Design and scale distributed systems for large-scale dataset generation, model training, and evaluation across Waymo's real-world and simulation data
- Own the reliability, efficiency, and observability of production ML serving, including accelerator capacity planning and performance optimization
- Keep offline evaluation and production inference consistent, so the models we evaluate are the models we serve
- Drive technical direction for the team, guide architectural decisions, and mentor engineers
- Collaborate with modeling, evaluation, and platform teams across Waymo to turn product and business goals into measurable technical deliverables
Our take
Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car company, is changing the way people get around. Its robotaxis, which don't need a human driver, are already operating in cities like Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Austin. Soon, Waymo will expand to Detroit, Las Vegas, and San Diego, showing just how autonomous cars are moving from experiments to real-world transportation.
The company has already completed over 10M fully driverless rides and driven more than 100M miles. Its cars use advanced sensors and AI to navigate streets safely, while partnerships with Uber and DoorDash show that Waymo's technology works for both passengers and deliveries. And it's feeling ambitious too, hoping to offer one million trips per week by the end of 2026.
Even with competitors like Tesla and Zoox, Waymo is leading the autonomous ride-hailing market. Its cars have fewer crashes and keep passengers safer than traditional vehicles. With international plans for London and Japan, Waymo isn't just growing in the US; it's setting its sights on shaping the future of transportation worldwide.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-1% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Feb 2026
$16bn
LATE VC
Aug 2024
$5.6bn
SERIES C
Total funding: $27.1bn
Company benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents
- Employee assistance programs focused on mental health
- Personalized workplace adjustments for diverse needs and abilities, including physical, mental, and neurodivergent considerations
- Access to mental health apps
- Onsite wellness centers
- Second medical opinion for you and your loved ones
- Medical advocacy program for transgender employees
- Counseling services
- Support programs including menopause benefit
- Competitive compensation
- Regular bonus and equity performance grant opportunities
- Generous 401(k) and regional retirement plans
- Annual cross-company compensation review and pay equity analysis
- 1-on-1 financial coaching
- Fertility and growing family assistance
- Parental leave and baby bonding leave
- Caregiver leave
- Elder care and support
- Backup childcare
- Survivor income benefit
- Paid time off, including vacation, bereavement, sick leave, parental leave, disability, and holidays
- Jury duty leave
- Military leave
- Hybrid work model with remote work opportunities also available
- Educational reimbursement
- Peer learning and coaching platform
- Donation matching programs
- Employee resource groups
- Volunteer hours
- Internal community groups and local culture clubs
- Inspiring spaces to work, recharge, and collaborate with fellow Waymonauts
- On-site meals and snacks
- Fitness centers, massage programs, and ergonomic support
- On-demand fitness, wellbeing, and cooking classes
- Commuter benefits
Company HQ
Mountain View, CA
Leadership
Dmitri Dolgov
(Co-CEO)Dmitri joined Waymo in 2016 as CTO, becoming Co-CEO in 2021. Prior to this, he spent nearly 8 years at Google as a Distinguished Software Engineer and 2 years at Toyota Research Institute as a Senior Research Scientist.
Tekedra N. Mawakana
(Co-CEO)Tekedra joined Waymo in 2017 as the Global Head of Policy, holding various roles before becoming Co-CEO in 2021. Previously, she was the VP of Global Government Relations and Public Policy at eBay and VP and Deputy General Counsel of GLobal Public Policy at Yahoo.
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