Waymo
Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Vision-Language Foundation Models
$251K–$310K
Mountain View, California, United States · Staff · Full-time · Posted Jul 23, 2026
- Experience
- 8+ years in deep learning, with at least 3+ years focused on LLMs or VLMs.
- Education
- Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI, ML, or a related technical field.
About the job
Leads development of vision-language foundation models and scalable data flywheels that improve autonomous-driving scene understanding, reasoning, and onboard perception.
What you'll do
- Lead multimodal pre-training data strategy and model domain adaptation.
- Design SFT and reinforcement-learning pipelines to improve instruction-following and driving-related reasoning.
- Build scalable inference and evaluation pipelines for edge-case sourcing and autolabeling; set training recipes and technical direction.
What they ask for
- Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI, ML, or a related technical field.
- 8+ years designing, training, and scaling deep learning models, including at least 3+ years focused on LLM or VLM training.
- Expertise across foundation-model development, including pre-training data curation, distributed training, and post-training.
- Expertise in distributed training infrastructure and Python, PyTorch, or JAX; proven ability to build scalable ML systems.
Nice to have
- PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field.
- Experience with reinforcement learning for language or vision, large-scale foundation-model data engineering, or multimodal perception in robotics or autonomous driving.
Pay
$251,000 — $310,000 USD (base salary)
Tools
Gemini, SFT, RLHF/RLAIF, DPO/GRPO/PPO, FSDP, Megatron, JAX/Pax, Python
AI focus
Develops multimodal foundation models for autonomous-driving reasoning, scene understanding, and large-scale autolabeling, using pre-training, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative