Waymo
Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, LLM/VLM Model Architecture & Optimization
$298K–$368K
Mountain View, CA, USA +3 · Senior Staff · Full-time · Posted Jun 22, 2026
- Location
- Mountain View, CA, USA
San Francisco, CA, USA
Mountain View, California, United States
San Francisco, California, United States - Experience
- 7+ years in Machine Learning, focused on large-scale model development (LLM, VLM, or similar foundation models).
- Education
- Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
About the job
Design and optimize LLM/VLM architectures for autonomous-driving perception, aligning models with hardware and enabling efficient on-device use.
What you'll do
- Design VLM/LLM architectures and align them with hardware architectures.
- Optimize model performance for on-device environments constrained by memory, power, and compute.
- Work with research, software engineering, hardware engineering, and product teams to deliver end-to-end solutions.
What they ask for
- Expertise in low-latency on-device inference and understanding of hardware acceleration.
- Extensive experience with deep learning frameworks and large-scale model training.
- Experience applying LLMs or foundation models in complex, safety-critical domains.
- Track record of operating under ambiguity and setting technical direction.
Nice to have
- Familiarity with multimodal data curation and quality assurance; background in autonomous vehicle perception, motion planning, or decision-making systems.
- Publications in top-tier ML or computer vision conferences; PhD in a relevant field.
Pay
$298,000 — $368,000 USD (base salary)
Tools
VLM, LLM, PyTorch, JAX
AI focus
Develop VLM/LLM architectures and optimize foundation models for low-latency, resource-constrained on-device inference in autonomous driving.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative