What are the responsibilities and job description for the Software Engineer, Perception, VLM Foundation position at Waymo?
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.
Semantics Foundation is a model platform team in Waymo Perception, and we build model platforms for other problem domain teams to use for addressing production issues. In this role, you will work on VLM for driving focusing on model pre-training, fine-tuning, and post-training, for Waymo applications.
You will report to the Technical Lead Manager of Semantics Foundation.
You will:
- Develop and deploy deep learning models, including vision language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs)
- Explore leveraging VLM's world knowledge and reasoning capabilities to improve various driving tasks
- Work on different phases of model development from data mining, training and eval, and deploy the models on the autonomous vehicles
- Collaborate and work in partnership with research teams across Alphabet
You have:
- BS degree in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of deep learning experience
- 4 years of industry or research experience with deep Learning, VLM/LLMs, and/or computer vision
- 4 years of experience with Python
- Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks such as Jax, PyTorch, Tensorflow
We prefer:
- Experience with training large VLM/LLMs with distributed training
- Experience with model optimization
- Experience of modeling with real-world sensor data (cameras, LIDAR, radars)
- Publications on top-tier conferences like CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, IJCV, PAMI
- Experience with C
#LI-hybrid
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 : $158,000 - $200,000
