Waymo · 3 weeks ago
Senior Machine Learning Engineer, LLM/VLM Visual Reasoning
Mountain View, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level
$204K/yr - $259K/yr
5+ years expWaymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. The role involves designing and implementing models for visual reasoning in autonomous driving, collaborating with engineers to integrate these capabilities into products, and optimizing model performance using advanced techniques.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)AutomotiveAutonomous VehiclesSensorTransportation
Responsibilities
Design and implement cutting-edge models and algorithms for spatial-temporal visual reasoning in autonomous driving scenarios, utilizing large language and vision models (LLM/VLM)
Develop and maintain robust training and evaluation pipelines for VLM models, focusing on metrics relevant to decision-making rationale and free-form question answering
Collaborate with ML engineers and researchers to integrate visual reasoning capabilities into product systems
Lead the effort to set up proper large-scale rationale/QA data and establish rigorous evaluation metrics for visual reasoning tasks
Explore and implement advanced techniques, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), to optimize model performance for complex visual reasoning challenges
Analyze and interpret large-scale sensor data to identify key challenges and opportunities for improving LLM/VLM performance in real-world driving environments
Qualification
Required
5+ years of experience in Machine Learning, with a focus on large-scale model development (LLM, VLM, or similar foundation models)
Proven expertise in visual reasoning, scene understanding, or related areas within autonomous driving, robotics, or computer vision
Strong coding proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (e.g., Jax, TensorFlow, PyTorch)
Hands-on experience with model training, evaluation, and deployment in a production environment
Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
Preferred
Experience with advanced training techniques, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning (RL) for language/vision models
Familiarity with large-scale data curation and quality assurance processes for multimodal datasets (e.g., rationale/QA data)
Background in autonomous vehicle perception, motion planning, or decision-making systems
Publications in top-tier machine learning or computer vision conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV)
PhD in a relevant field
Benefits
Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program
Equity incentive plan
Generous Company benefits program
Company
Waymo
Waymo is a mobility technology company that improves transportation by developing self-driving solutions for travelers and daily commuters. It is a sub-organization of Alphabet.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Waymo has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (231)
2024 (175)
2023 (268)
2022 (306)
2021 (298)
2020 (317)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$11.1BKey Investors
Alphabet
2024-07-23Series C· $5.6B
2021-06-16Series B· $2.5B
2020-05-12Series A· $750M
Leadership Team
Tekedra Mawakana
Co-Chief Executive Officer
Elisa de Martel
Chief Financial Officer
Recent News
2026-01-12
PYMNTS.com
2026-01-12
Company data provided by crunchbase