Staff Machine Learning Engineer – VLM/LLM

Waymo|06 Feb 2026

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Listed location: Mountain View, CA, USA; San Francisco, CA, USA; New York City, NY, USA

Work arrangement: onsite. A remote label does not confirm worldwide eligibility or visa sponsorship.

Read the employer’s description for qualifications, compensation and work eligibility. Confirm the position is still open on the application page.

Job description supplied by Waymo; category and skill labels may be inferred. How our listings work · Report a problem

Job Description

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.

This role follows a hybrid work schedule and you will report to a Senior Staff Software Engineer.

You will:

Work with a creative team of people who help to build the state-of-the-art Foundation Models that are used throughout Waymo’s systems, both onboard autonomous vehicles and offboard in simulation
Lead the development of end-to-end evaluation systems and benchmarks for Waymo Foundation models, encompassing the entire lifecycle from pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL), for evaluating the quality, safety, and realism of embodied AI agents
Partner within and across organizations to land disruptive and innovative tech in production
Implement and extend large large scale data and evaluation pipelines

You have:

Master’s degree or PhD degree in Computer Science, similar technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience
5+ years of experience in ML engineering and applied Deep Learning, with a strong portfolio of shipped products or publication record
Experience with large scale distributed system
Proficient programming skills (eg: Python, C/C++)
Strong analytical and debugging skills

We prefer:

ML infra experience: training, evaluating and deploying ML models at scale
Deep learning experience, especially with generative models, e.g., LLMs/VLMs, and/or reinforcement learning
Proficiency and in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of an ML framework (e.g. Pytorch, JAX, Tensorflow)

In accordance with Washington state law, we are highlighting our comprehensive benefits package, which is available to all eligible US based employees. Benefits for this role include:

Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance
Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match
Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment
Sick Time: 40 hours/year (statutory, where applicable); 5 days/event (discretionary)
Maternity Leave (Short-Term Disability + Baby Bonding): 28-30 weeks
Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks
Holidays: 13 paid days per year

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

$238,000—$302,000 USD

Skills mentioned

PythonPyTorchTensorFlowJAXLLMReinforcement LearningC++

Frequently asked questions

Is the Staff Machine Learning Engineer – VLM/LLM position at Waymo remote?

The Staff Machine Learning Engineer – VLM/LLM role at Waymo does not have a confirmed remote arrangement in our data. Check the employer description for its work location.

What type of employment is the Staff Machine Learning Engineer – VLM/LLM role?

Waymo is hiring for a full-time Staff Machine Learning Engineer – VLM/LLM position.

Which skills are mentioned for the Staff Machine Learning Engineer – VLM/LLM job at Waymo?

Detected skill labels include Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, LLM, Reinforcement Learning, C++. Check the employer description to distinguish required skills from preferred experience.