Waymo · 20 hours ago
Director of AI Foundations, Foundation Model Evaluation & Integration
San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Director/Executive
$332K/yr - $421K/yrWaymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. The role focuses on developing machine learning solutions for autonomous driving, optimizing model integration, and evaluating Waymo Foundation Models while collaborating with various research teams.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)AutomotiveAutonomous VehiclesSensorTransportation
Responsibilities
Be accountable for the productive integration of the Foundation Model Teacher setups developed by the AIF and ML Infra teams into customer student team frameworks, and for maintaining these integrations
Working with customers to understand their needs and working backwards from those needs
Optimize the teacher / student model distillation process, model inference footprints and sampling techniques to fit compute constraints
Define and implement metrics and evaluation infrastructure necessary for evaluating Waymo Foundation Models
Develop frameworks and approaches that power data ‘Data Flywheel‘ mining and annotation applications using Foundation Models training and evaluation, using Waymo data and also third party data
Qualification
Required
Machine learning expertise, with a track record of contributing to large scale ML production systems and their development cycle
Software engineering infrastructure experience. Technical ability to dive deep into complex systems, infrastructure, algorithms, and modeling techniques
Experience with evaluating and optimizing large scale ML / AI systems
Experience of leading engineering teams of 10+
Hired and developed world class managers and scientists
Strong communication and planning skills (e.g. building 12 month roadmaps)
Strong cross-organization collaboration skills
Preferred
Direct experience developing large pre-trained foundational models (LLM / VLM / Video models)
Experience across multiple ML applications (e.g. natural language processing and vision) in multiple settings (e.g. founded a successful startup and lead a significant team at a FAANG company)
Has experience with the dev-ops side of ML models (e.g. model training latency, regression prevention)
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.
Founded in 2009
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
Annabel Chang
Head of State Policy & Government Relations
Recent News
2026-01-16
2026-01-16
Company data provided by crunchbase