Engineering Manager; ML), Perception, Vehicle Understanding

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 Semantics Understanding team is tackling the "last 1%" of autonomous driving perception. In this role, you will own the production modules related to Vehicle Understanding for the Waymo Driver. This area includes vehicles’ fine-grained classification (e.g., emergency, railed, construction, towing), states (e.g., warning, temporal blockage, active loading/unloading), and intents (e.g., lane-changes, stalled/slow, double-parking, unparking). Being on the critical path of Waymo's domestic/international expansion, you will drive immediate impact and the 0-to-1 changes that push boundaries of the Waymo Driver's generalizability.

In this hybrid role, you will report to our Senior Staff TLM of Semantics Understanding.

• Lead a team responsible for a key production area to scale Waymo's business
• Develop a strong collaborative relationship with upstream and downstream teams to facilitate the end-to-end solutions for the corresponding product domains
• Exercise technical leadership by pushing the boundaries of onboard/offboard generalizability, e.g., by leveraging onboard/offboard multi-modal foundational models, large-scale 3rd party data, and partner teams in Research, Oracles, and Simulation.
• Manage a team (~10) with diverse skills including engineering, modeling, ML infrastructure, of senior and junior SWEs, foster an inclusive culture for sustained team growth, and hiring world-class talents.
• Collaborate with Platform/Infra partners to optimize the team’s key pipelines (e.g., data, training, evaluation, onboard) for high performance, efficiency, and reliability.
• Develop the execution strategies that balance short-term and long-term priorities. Drive process and clarify R&R for cross-organizational alignments.

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning or related disciplines
• 7+ years of experience in deep learning systems, specifically in computer vision, or multi-modal perception
• 3+ years of experience managing medium-sized (10+ people) production teams in complex, fast-paced environments with a track record in developing team culture and growing people.
• Experience in collaborating with technical, research and business stakeholders to drive impactful solutions.

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning or related disciplines
• Publications in top CV conferences (NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, etc.)
• Experience in the autonomous vehicles industry

$251,000 - $310,000 USD

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.