Software Engineer, ML and Data Infra

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

While at Waymo, you will enjoy benefits that cover…

Health and wellness: Our people are at the heart of everything we do. At Waymo, you can enjoy top-notch medical, dental and vision insurance, mental wellness support, a Flexible Spending Account (FSA), a Health Saving Account (HSA), and special wellness programs.

Financial wellness: Your financial peace of mind is important to us. At Waymo, we offer competitive compensation, bonus opportunities, equity, a generous 401(k) plan, 1-on-1 financial coaching, a 529 College Savings Plan and lots of other perks and employee discounts.

Flexibility and time off: Take the time you need to relax and recharge. Enjoy the flexibility to work from another location for four weeks per year. We support an on-site or hybrid work model and offer remote working opportunities, paid time off, bereavement, sick, and parental leave.

Supporting families: When it comes to growing your family or caring for your loved ones, you have our full support. Enhanced leave options include paid parental leave (birthing parent gets 24 weeks of paid leave with up to 4 weeks of additional leave before their due date, and non-birthing parent gets 18 weeks of paid leave), and 20 days of subsidized backup childcare or adult/elder care. Access to fertility care or adoption support as you grow your family.

Community and personal development: At Waymo, you'll find a range of opportunities to grow, connect, and give back. We offer education reimbursement, personal and professional development, mentorship, and other ways to connect through Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), other internal groups, and even time off to volunteer.

Cool perks: Access to Google offices, cafes, wellness centers, massages, and so much more. To support your wellbeing at home, you can enjoy at-home fitness and cooking classes, and more.

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.

#LI-Hybrid