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 One, a fully autonomous ride-hailing service, and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over one million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving tens of millions of miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 13+ U.S. states. The mission of the Waymo Applied Research team is to develop machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving, towards the goal of the 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. This hybrid role, you will report to our Director of Research. - Plan and execute a bold agenda in adapting foundation models for AV planning - Incorporate and extend cutting edge research in robotics and machine learning to advance the state of the art for high level planning for autonomous vehicles, with advanced techniques in foundation model post-training and inference time scaling. This may include: - Data curation - Supervised fine-tuning - Alignment and reasoning via RL - Sampling, search, MCTS, Chain-of-Thought - Distillation - Preference labeling for training and evaluation - Manage and technically lead a team of research scientists as they grow in their careers - Partner across organizations to land disruptive tech in production - Publish work at top-tier academic venues - Masters degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, similar technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience - Experience developing or doing research in post-training of LLMs, VLMs or other MMLMs, ideally in robotics, but also in related domains like language. - Management experience with a team size of 5+ - Hands-on experience with an ability to technically lead ICs daily, including knowledge of the codebase, eval and data pipelines, model, and algorithms. - Proficiency in Python, Numpy, and Jax or Pytorch - Masters or PhD, preferably in Machine Learning domain - Background in publications in top-tier conferences or leading open source projects in the related fields - Proficiency in C++ - Experience in AV planning and related research 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 $281,000—$356,000 USD