- Robot type
- Autonomous Vehicle
- Location
- San FranciscoCaliforniaUSA
- Job type
- Artificial Intelligence
- Posted
- Oct 22, 2026
- Salary
- $213,000–$263,000 a year
Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Scenes, Traffic Controls
Job description
Driver Refinement and Validation’s (DRV) mission is to build upon the high-quality ML Driver developed by Driver Intelligence, refining its performance to improve autonomous driving in specific, complex real-world contexts and problem areas (e.g., Ride-Hailing contexts). It aims to ensure that the Waymo Driver always computes safe, compliant, comfortable, and useful plans. As a Machine Learning Engineer in DRV, you will bridge the gap between cutting-edge machine learning and real-world vehicle performance, engineering the validation and onboard systems that ensure the autonomous vehicle reliably executes intelligent and predictable maneuvers.
Waymo is an autonomous driving technology…
Job responsibilities
- Own ML features for Scene Understanding (traffic controls, signs, special regions such as RRX and flood zones, lane states) end to end: data → model → eval → onboard launch
- Mine and curate large-scale driving data (real and simulated) to find long-tail failures, build training and eval sets, and design labeling and supervision
- Design, train, and iterate on model tasks and heads in large multi-task models. Improve calibration, robustness, and generalization to new geographies
- Build rigorous evaluation: PRT metrics, slicing taxonomies, side-by-sides, and staging launches, and turn the results into launch decisions
- Integrate models into the onboard stack (C++), combining learned outputs with safe heuristic fallbacks, Mendel-guarded rollouts, and map-contradiction handling
- Triage real driving events, find the root cause anywhere in the stack, and propose surgical or systemic fixes. Work closely with Perception, Reasoning, Mapping, and ML Infrastructure teams
Job requirements
- BS/MS/PhD in CS, EE, Robotics, ML, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Hands-on experience shipping ML models to production, including training, offline evaluation, and deployment (L4: 2+ yrs; L5: 4+ yrs, or a PhD plus 2+ yrs)
- Strong data mining / data engineering: building large-scale batch pipelines (Beam/Flume/Spark or similar) and analytical SQL to find, slice, and curate data
- Proficiency in Python with a modern DL framework (JAX, TensorFlow, or PyTorch) and production C++
- Demonstrated cross-stack generalist work: has owned problems that crossed data, model, and systems/serving boundaries
- Rigorous evaluation instincts: metric design, error analysis and slicing, and A/B or staged rollout
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