Woven by Toyota · 6 hours ago
Staff Machine Learning Engineer - World Foundation Model
Palo Alto, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$161K/yr - $264K/yr
7+ years expWoven by Toyota is enabling Toyota’s transformation into a mobility company through human-centric innovation. They are seeking a technical lead responsible for the vision and strategy of world foundation models research and development in the automated driving domain, focusing on cutting-edge machine learning solutions for autonomous driving.
AutomotiveAutonomous VehiclesSoftware
Responsibilities
Lead the design, development and benchmarking of state-of-the-art world foundation models for autonomous driving, ranging from data strategy, multistage training, model selection, and eventual deployment and integration with onboard and offboard applications
Architect visually realistic simulators to evaluate full end-to-end autonomy stack behavior, from simulating sensors to policy rollouts, across a diverse range of scenario conditions
Research and implement cutting-edge approaches across domains (reinforcement learning, probabilistic & generative modeling, scene representations, sensor fusion, temporal reasoning) and validate their effectiveness in simulation and through real-world driving performance
Align efforts across various company-internal teams as well as TRI, providing technical mentorship and fostering a collaborative, high-trust engineering culture across organizational boundaries, influencing technical decisions across the partnership, and possibly co-authoring publications for premier conferences and journals
Increase the scalability of ML pipelines to support the training and inference of large foundation models, and to optimize edge deployment of state-of-the-art architectures
Curate scenarios, develop system introspection capabilities, and establish frameworks for understanding model behavior and performance at scale
Qualification
Required
MS or PhD in computer vision, ML, robotics, or related quantitative fields
7+ years of professional experience with computer vision, ML, or applied science
Strong hands-on experience with foundation models, world models, generative AI, multimodal transformers, diffusion, VLAs, or large end-to-end behavior models for robotics or autonomy
Expertise in PyTorch (preferred), JAX, or TensorFlow; strong Python and C++ skills
Strong understanding of temporal/sequential modeling, probabilistic modeling, reinforcement learning, Bayesian inference, state-space models, and uncertainty quantification
Strong understanding of 3D perception, multi-view geometry and sensor fusion
Hands-on experience with large-scale distributed training, ML workflows (data curation, training, evaluation, deployment), and inference optimization
Knowledge of debugging, profiling and deploying deep neural networks with NVIDIA tooling (CUDA, Nsight, TensorRT) and ONNX
Experience with simulation platforms (e.g., CARLA, Applied Intuition, Nvidia DriveSim, etc.), their internal principles and their integration into autonomous system workflows
Proven track record of leading large, multi-person technical projects and influencing technical direction across organizations, as well as strong communication skills
Preferred
Publications at top-tier venues (e.g. NeurIPS, CVPR, ICML, ICRA, RSS)
Experience with closed-loop simulation validation, scenario generation, rare-event or counterfactual testing
Experience with multi-agent simulation or high-fidelity 3D environments and game engines (e.g Unreal)
Experience with 3D generation or reconstruction (e.g., Gaussian Splatting, NeRFs)
Prior experience in fast-paced R&D environments bridging research and production
Benefits
Excellent health, wellness, dental and vision coverage
A rewarding 401k program
Flexible vacation policy
Family planning and care benefits
Company
Woven by Toyota
Woven by Toyota improve the vehicle intelligence software and operation and accelerate the Toyota Mobility Concept.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Woven by Toyota has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
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Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
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Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (71)
2024 (34)
2023 (15)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageLeadership Team
John Absmeier
Chief Technology Officer
Edwin Han
Senior Partnerships Manager
Recent News
2025-10-02
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