Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Weather & Degraded Road Surfaces

Perception Team Overview

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 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.

It has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over  miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

The Perception team builds the system that learns the spatial–temporal representation and the semantic meanings of the surrounding environment of the autonomous driving vehicle (ADV). We work jointly with downstream teams on optimization and integration into the Waymo Driver, conduct our own research to address real‑world problems, and collaborate with research teams  have access to millions of miles of driving data from a diverse set of sensors, enabling engineers like you to develop methods for efficiently and continuously learning from large‑scale real‑world data, develop models and training at scale, analyze real‑world behavior and develop systems for handling the complexities of interacting with the real‑world, and optimize models for our onboard and offboard hardware.

The DRAW team is a perception problem‑domain team—our name stands for Degraded Road Surfaces and Weather. We take a high‑level business problem like "Waymo vehicles need to drive safely in snow" and use whatever technologies and tools we need to solve the problem t of our work is ML‑related. Recently we have been working with both large supervised multi‑model models (lidar+camera+radar) and few‑shot detection using Vision Language Models (VLMs).

We work closely with perception platform teams that build infrastructure for us as well as behavior teams that focus on changing the car's behavior in response to new outputs we produce.

Previously, our main focus was on driving in rain and dense fog. We built Waymo's first ever ML weather estimators to determine the weather around the vehicle and set the vehicle's speed accordingly. We also developed signals to determine when our sensors are in need of cleaning and delivered ML models that let the vehicle avoid floods and puddles. We have also worked to make the waymo ADV driver appropriately around potholes, sand, trenches, debris, etc.

Our new focus area is snow—we need to build models to understand road friction, snow accumulation, tire tracks in snow, and more.

In this hybrid role you will report to a Technical Lead Manager.

• Apply machine learning techniques to build multi‑modal sensor fusion architectures and spatial‑temporal representation learners for object detection and tracking, occupancy and semantic segmentation, road understanding, etc.
• Develop scalable recipes for large data, large model training running on Alphabet's compute infrastructure, create methods and recipes for pre‑training and post‑training.
• Develop methods and recipes for distributed fine‑tuning enabling multiple developers to simultaneously improve the model, develop methods and recipes to avoid regression against a production system.
• Develop and maintain model evaluation recipes and metrics for measuring and improving performance of pre‑trained and fine‑tuned models.

• Bachelor's 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.
• Experience with Python.
• Experience with ML frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, or Tensorflow.

• MS or PhD in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science or a similar discipline.
• Publications at top‑tier conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, ICRA, IROS, RSS, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCV, PAMI.
• Experience with C++.

The expected base salary range for this full‑time position across US locations is $204,000–$259,000 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.