Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the 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 One, a fully autonomous ride-hailing service, and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over one million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving tens of millions of miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 13+ U.S. states.

The Perception team at Waymo is at the heart of our Autonomous Vehicles with a mission to perceive and represent everything from pedestrians to vehicles to long-tail phenomena. Perception Data Primary is the core function that owns the infrastructure and tools to understand vast amounts of Waymo driving data, curating them into effective datasets, and ensuring their availability and quality to accelerate Perception and Waymo driver development. This spans areas from performant onboard real-time systems to highly scalable offboard systems that directly ensure data powering Perception's machine learning (ML) models, diverse ML task evaluation, foundational model development and commercialization.

In this role, you'll:

• Develop and launch new techniques to fulfill Perception's growing long-tail data needs, applying new technologies including foundational models and VLMs
• Ensure scalable data mining and data delivery in Perception through infrastructure, ML algorithms and customer engagement
• Drive collaborations with Perception data users and model owners and teams across Waymo to directly solve diverse driving challenges, especially through foundation models
• Ensure and maximize Waymo's data and commercialization scaling in new cities, platforms and businesses, including end-to-end impact on the Waymo data funnel

At a minimum we'd like you to have:

• Experience with ML data engineering including data pipelines, data indexing and data balancing
• Experience with Applied ML including embeddings, inference and evaluation metrics
• Stay informed about relevant technology trends and developments to identify and explore new data mining techniques
• Experience collaborating with data customers and other partners; customer-oriented mindset
• C++
• MS and 1+ years of industrial experience, or equivalent

It's preferred if you have:

• Machine learning infrastructure experience, including labeling, model training, model and system evaluation.
• Machine learning experience, including fine-tuning, few-shot training, pre-training, distillation, transfer learning
• Vector search experience, including RAG applications
• Python

#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.