Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Tech Lead, Labeling AutomationPosted today$310K

The opportunity

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…

What you'll do

  • Architect and Scale Auto-Labeling: Lead the design and deployment of highly scalable auto-labeling pipelines that significantly improve data throughput and reduce our reliance on manual annotation bottlenecks.

  • Build Robust Auto-Graders: Develop automated anomaly detection and quality evaluation systems (auto-graders) to assess annotation accuracy, detect regressions, and enforce rigorous quality standards across millions of labels.

  • Train & Deploy SOTA Computer Vision Models: Train, optimize, and push into production advanced 2D and 3D computer vision models. You will utilize architectures ranging from foundational zero-shot models like SAM (Segment Anything Model) and efficient real-time detectors like YOLO, to bespoke 3D perception and tracking models.

  • Leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs): Fine-tune, and deploy large VLMs and LLMs, utilizing prompt optimization and advanced post-training techniques (SFT, RL, etc.), to solve complex, open-set labeling and contextual reasoning tasks.

  • Drive Technical Direction: Act as a technical pillar for the Labeling organization. Set the long-term ML strategy, guide architectural decisions, and mentor senior and mid-level engineers.

  • Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work closely with Perception, Planner, and Simulation teams to align labeling capabilities with the evolving ML data needs of the Waymo Driver.

What they're looking for

  • + years of professional experience in the field of software engineering and applied machine learning
  • Experience programming in C++ or Python
  • Experience building, evaluating, and deploying deep learning models for: object detection, segmentation, and spatial tracking
  • Experience in large model training, distributed computing, and scaling deep: learning architectures using frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow