New

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Foundation Model Sensor Data

Waymo
$281,000-$356,000 USD
United States, California, Mountain View
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway (Show on map)
Sep 01, 2025
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 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. You will: Build large-scale sensor data for training and evaluating LLM/VLM-based Foundation Models, with a special focus on scene and semantics understanding. Enable large-scale training and eval for LLM/VLM-based foundation models with high-quality, targeted sensor data. Create data strategies for Foundation Model Flywheel that advances our critical businesses: large-scale sensor data collection, business-driven sensor data sampling, long-tail data mining, large-scale auto-labeling, targeted efficient human labeling, human-in-the-loop sensor data curation and quality improving. Collaborate with foundation model owners to co-evolve our data and model components: using foundation models to auto-label large-scale driving data, and mining targeted long-tails to improve foundation models. Set up and evolve the working structure between multiple teams across Waymo, where we maximize reuse of infrastructure and tooling. Responsible for defining and delivering large-scale and high-quality sensor dataset for foundation model training and evaluation. You have: Track record in building datasets for large-scale systems like VLMs and LLMs. Track record in developing reliable and high-quality data infrastructure for large-scale deep learning systems. Experience in large-scale data curation, data sampling, data mining, and/or data-model co-evolving. Experience in collaborating with horizontal teams, from model teams, infrastructure teams, and data teams, to advance key product success. We prefer: Having first-hand experience as users of data for large-scale generalist deep learning models. Experience in large-scale distributed systems or products. 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