Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's 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’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

The mission of the Waymo AI Foundations team is to develop machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving, towards the goal of safely operating Waymo vehicles in dozens of cities and under all driving conditions. As part of our work, we also initiate and foster collaborations with other research teams in Alphabet. AI Foundations areas that we are currently focusing on include reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, generative modeling, Bayesian inference, hierarchical learning, and robust evaluation.

You will:

• Led a team of scientists and engineers to build state-of-the-art VLM/LLM for autonomous driving domain.

• Define the vision and strategy for leveraging the latest multimodal LLM/VLM to improve the generalization capability for Waymo Driver, similar to EMMA.

• Build the training and data platform for Waymo-specific multimodal LLMs/VLMs.

• Deliver impact from LLM/VLM Teacher models to Waymo products in perception, mapping, and simulation.

• Collaborate with other teams to jointly build the Waymo Foundation Model.

You Have:

• Track record in leading a medium size team of ~10 people.

• Track record in developing multimodal LLMs/VLMs.

• Experience in collaborating with horizontal teams.

• Technical ability to dive deep into complex systems, infrastructure, algorithms, and modeling techniques.

Nice to have:

• Experience in large-scale system development.

• LLM/VLM related publications or research work.

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.

Salary Range**$281,000—$356,000 USD**