Software Engineer, Perception, Scene Understanding

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 Scene Semantics team is responsible for developing ML models for scene understanding around construction, emergency scenes, mapless driving and world changes. The team works on the end to end ML pipeline from data mining, labeling, training onboard / offboard models, and deployment. We need someone with strong ML experience to drive the architecture upgrades and product feature development.

In this hybrid role, you will report to a Technical Lead Manager within Semantics.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and deploy deep learning models, including vision language models and Large Language Models
• Create multi-modal sensor fusion architectures for scene understanding
• Develop data mining, labeling, training and eval pipelines
• Collaborate with research teams across Alphabet
• Design large-scale foundation models trained on vast data

Minimum Requirements

• BS degree in Computer Science or similar discipline, or equivalent deep learning experience
• 3+ years of industry or research experience with LLMs, VLMs or Computer Vision
• 3+ years experience with Python
• Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks like Jax, PyTorch, Tensorflow

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD degree in Computer Science or equivalent deep learning experience
• Publications in top-tier conferences (CVPR/ICCV/ECCV/ICLR/ICML/NeurIPS/ICLR/AAAI/IJCV/PAMI)
• Github repositories or Tech Blogs of LLMs/VLMs
• Experience with C++

Benefits

• Eligible for Waymo's discretionary annual bonus program
• Equity incentive plan
• Comprehensive Company benefits program