Technical Lead, Perception Fallback Systems

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 HAL team makes civilized Perception possible! We provide the stable sensing stack on which the Perception models run, which means providing and rendering sensor data (including fusion), calibrating and validating sensors, estimating weather and visibility, and making the whole stack deal gracefully with degraded sensing or failures. We  interface with the Waymo HW teams and have huge influence on the HW design of new sensors. We're looking for a lead that will work on the architecture of Perception's alternate pipelines that are used when the main Perception stack can no longer be run. In this role, you will design the architecture and design of this stack, drive the work of engineers across the entire Perception team to implement it, and collaborate inside a larger, Waymo-wide working group to deliver an end-to-end solution. 

You will:

• Be highly involved with the state of the art in ML model development in Perception (these projects are often where we can try our new tech)
• Develop technical leadership across the whole Perception stack, and also well-positioned to collaborate beyond the team with hardware and behavior (planner etc.) teams and get great full-stack experience

You have:

• M.S. in Computer Science (or related fields) with 10 years work experience
• 5+ years experience in developing, optimizing, evaluating, and deploying ML algorithms into large-scale software systems.
• Academic background and industry experience in one or more related fields: Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Computer Graphics & Rendering;

We Prefer:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science (or related fields) and 7 years work experience;
• 3+ years’ experience in simulation, perception, autonomous driving, and robotics
• Direct experience in using or developing multi-modal foundation models
• Strong background in perception related domains, such as transformer modeling, model scaling, self-supervised learning
• Publications at top-tier conferences like CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, ICRA, RSS, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCV, PAMI

This role reports to an Engineering Director

#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.