Waymo
Staff Tech Lead, Perception, Pre-training & Distillation
$251K–$310K
Mountain View, California, United States, San Francisco, California, United States +2 · Staff · Full-time · Posted Sep 1, 2026
- Location
- Mountain View, California, United States, San Francisco, California, United States
Mountain View, California, United States
San Francisco, California, United States - Experience
- 5+ years experience in Machine Learning and/or Computer Vision
- Education
- MS or PhD in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of deep learning experience
About the job
Leads development of large-scale perception foundation models, pre-training and distillation for production use in the Waymo Driver.
What you'll do
- Train spatio-temporal foundation models and develop self-supervised learning and multi-teacher distillation methods.
- Deliver production-ready pre-trained models and evaluate latent representations in collaboration with post-training teams.
- Curate training datasets and contribute to technical roadmaps.
What they ask for
- MS or PhD in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of deep learning experience
- 5+ years experience in Machine Learning and/or Computer Vision
- Fluent in Python
- In-depth experience with ML frameworks like PyTorch or JAX
Nice to have
- Publications at top-tier conferences or journals listed in the posting
- Experience with C++ or real-time system design
Pay
$251,000 — $310,000 USD base salary
Tools
Python, PyTorch, JAX, C++
AI focus
Develops self-supervised spatio-temporal foundation models, including image/video and 3D point cloud encoders, reconstruction or future prediction, vision-language contrastive learning, and multi-teacher distillation.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative