Senior Engineering Manager, VLM foundation

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 Team at Waymo builds the system that "sees" the world around the self-driving car. We conduct novel research to address real-world perception problems and collaborate with research teams at Alphabet. Here at Waymo, we have access to unprecedented amounts of driving data from a diverse set of sensors, enabling researchers and engineers like you to develop solutions for autonomous driving. Improvements deployed to our system can immediately help our large fleet of autonomous vehicles.

Team:

We are seeking an experienced engineering manager to lead the visual language models (VLM) foundation team. In this role, you will develop genAI solutions for autonomous driving and scale Waymo’s business by revolutionizing the onboard system to efficiently address long tail issues. You are responsible for development and the deployment of the VLM models, unlocking model capabilities, while maintaining high performance, compute efficiency, and reliability.

In this role you will:

• Lead a team responsible for building visual language models (VLM) for autonomous driving to scale Waymo's business by addressing long tail issues
• Provide strong technical leadership, develop model training recipes (e.g. pre-training, post-training, distillation), adapt model architecture, and optimize model run time latency to balance cost and quality. Set the technical direction for the team, and also influence the direction of the broader Perception organization. 
• Develop the execution strategies that balance short-term and long-term priorities. Drive process and clarify R&Rs for cross-organizational alignments. 
• Manage a team (~15) with diverse skills including engineering, modeling, optimization, VLM, and ML infrastructure, of senior and junior SWEs, and foster an inclusive culture for sustained team growth. 
• Closely collaborate with Waymo Research and Google Deepmind to keep pace with the fast development of the VLM space and enable a cutting edge scalable onboard system. Develop a strong collaborative relationship with upstream and downstream teams to facilitate the end-to-end solutions for the corresponding product domains

You have:

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning  or related disciplines
• 7+ years of experience in computer vision and deep learning production systems in the autonomous driving vehicle space, and / or in-depth experience in VLM development in production systems. 
• 3+ years of experience managing medium teams (10+ people) in complex, fast-paced environments with a track record in developing team culture and growing people.
• Knowledge and experience with LLM/VLM development.
• Experience in collaborating with technical, research and business stakeholders to drive impactful solutions. 

We prefer:

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning  or related disciplines
• 10+ years of experience in deep learning, machine learning, and related fields
• Publications in top CV conferences (NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, etc.)

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.