Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the 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 ML Infrastructure team at Waymo provides a set of tools to support and automate the lifecycle of the machine learning workflow, including feature and experiment management, model development, debugging and evaluation, deployment, and monitoring. These efforts have resulted in making machine learning more accessible to teams at Waymo, ensuring greater degrees of consistency and repeatability, and addressing the "last mile" of getting models into production and managing them once they are in place. We work with machine learning experts in all parts of the company. This is crucial to the development of Waymo Foundation Models for driving including evaluation, auto-labeling and distillation.
You'll be responsible to:

• Set the direction of multiple teams working on ML infrastructure for training, inference, and training data collection
• Communicate a long-term vision for ML Infra at Waymo in the era of Generative AI
• Translate that vision to annual operating plans and goals
• Coach managers, sr. managers, technical leads, and principal engineers to be independent leaders
• Work with customers to understand their needs and working backwards from those needs
• Look around corners, make bold bets, and be technically motivated as the team delivers big, discontinuous, creative improvements
• Improve for the long term
• Set specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant goals for teams within the organization to support Waymo's business
• Deploy scalable mechanisms to foster a culture of continuous improvement
• Dive deep and audit our systems using mechanisms like weekly operational metrics reviews, monthly goals reviews, and quarterly program reviews
• Hire and develop the best ML infra and optimization talent in the world
• Approach your work with humility and curiosity, continuously learning
• Set a high bar and be divinely discontent with the status quo

At a minimum, we'd like you to have:

• Led multiple single threaded teams of around a 100 people
• Hired and developed world class L6 and L7 managers and scientists
• Written vision documents for organizations and mapped them to multi-year roadmaps
• Created sustainable mechanisms for continuous improvement
• Built and maintained ML training pipelines at scale
• Led teams who improve ML models for speed and efficiency
• Built and operated large-scale distributed systems
• Expertise in the common ways of gathering training data for ML systems
• Expertise in the area of Generative AI, specifically when it comes to pretraining foundation models, fine tuning them, and distilling them to smaller models

It's preferred if you:

• Can explain all aspects of foundation models at a high level
• Have built infra on which foundation models were trained
• Are familiar with the common ML modeling techniques of today such as transformers from a computational standpoint, including common optimization techniques

While at Waymo, you will enjoy benefits that cover...
Health and wellness: Our people are at the heart of everything we do. At Waymo, you can enjoy top-notch medical, dental and vision insurance, mental wellness support, a Flexible Spending Account (FSA), a Health Saving Account (HSA), and special wellness programs.
Financial wellness: Your financial peace of mind is important to us. At Waymo, we offer competitive compensation, bonus opportunities, equity, a generous 401(k) plan, 1-on-1 financial coaching, a 529 College Savings Plan and lots of other perks and employee discounts.
Flexibility and time off: Take the time you need to relax and recharge. Enjoy the flexibility to work from another location for four weeks per year. We support an on-site or hybrid work model and offer remote working opportunities, paid time off, bereavement, sick, and parental leave.
Supporting families: When it comes to growing your family or caring for your loved ones, you have our full support. Enhanced leave options include paid parental leave (birthing parent gets 24 weeks of paid leave with up to 4 weeks of additional leave before their due date, and non-birthing parent gets 18 weeks of paid leave), and 20 days of subsidized backup childcare or adult/elder care.. Access to fertility care or adoption support as you grow your family.
Community and personal development: At Waymo, you'll find a range of opportunities to grow, connect, and give back. We offer education reimbursement, personal and professional development, mentorship, and other ways to connect through Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), other internal groups, and even time off to volunteer.
Cool perks: Access to Google offices, cafes, wellness centers, massages, and so much more. To support your wellbeing at home, you can enjoy at-home fitness and cooking classes, and more.
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
$323,000-$410,000 USD
We appreciate your interest in Waymo. Waymo is an equal employment opportunity employer, committed to maintaining a supportive and inclusive workplace for all employees. Waymo does not discriminate against, and prohibits harassment of, any applicant or employee based on race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, age, disability, military status, genetic information or any other basis protected by applicable law. Waymo will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal records in accordance with applicable law. Waymo is committed to ensuring equal opportunity for qualified individuals with disabilities. If you are an individual with a disability and require an accommodation to participate in the application or interview process, please let the recruiting team know or email waymo-candidatesupport@google.com. (This email address is intended to be used only for requesting accommodations as part of the application process. Other inquiries will not receive a response.)