Technical Lead, Perception

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.

Our Perception team builds the system that "sees" the world around the self-driving car. We conduct research to address real-world problems and collaborate with research teams at Alphabet. We have access to millions of miles of driving data from a diverse set of sensors, helping researchers like you to develop complex models and techniques at scale. You will drive horizontal efforts in building the state-of-the-art LLM/VLM models for various perception applications, including scene understanding, object understanding. You will work with teams horizontally across perception, and teams like planner, mapping, and simulation, along with Waymo Research.

In this hybrid role, you will report into an Engineering Director.

You will:

• Lead efforts in building model platforms for perception, powering many offboard and onboard applications for the Waymo Driver
• Drive the development and deployment of Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Promote collaboration with multiple problem domain teams and with research teams across Alphabet

You have:

• Deep learning expertise, including recent innovation in large pre-trained foundational models and architecture performance optimizations
• Experience with Large Language Models (LLM) or Vision Language Models (VLM)
• Execution mindset and skills in a fast paced environment

We prefer:

• PhD in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of deep learning experience with 8+ years of experience
• Strong background in perception related domains, such as object detection/classification, scene understanding, transformer modeling, model scaling, self-supervised learning
• Publications at top-tier conferences like CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, ICRA, RSS, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCV, PAMI

#LI-Hybrid

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.