Staff Technical Lead Manager, Perception

About Waymo

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’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

The Perception Team

The Perception team builds the system which learns the spatial-temporal representation and their semantic meanings of the surrounding environment of the self-driving car, i.e., the system that “perceives” the world around the car. We work jointly with downstream teams on the optimization and integration into the Waymo Driver. We conduct our own research to address real-world problems and collaborate with research teams at Alphabet. We have access to millions of miles of driving data from a diverse set of sensors, enabling engineers like you to (1) develop methods for efficiently and continuously learning from large scale real-world data, to (2) develop models and model training at scale, to (3) analyze real-world behavior and develop systems for handling the complexities of interacting with the real-world, and (4) optimize models for our onboard and offboard hardware.

In this hybrid role you will report to a Sr Staff Technical Lead Manager.

What You Will Do as a Staff Technical Lead Manager, Perception

• Own model updates and model deployment in an automated data selection/model update pipeline, for an ML system serving millions of rides.
• Lead the design and implementation of data selection and incremental model updates, for a multi-billion parameter model.
• Develop and deploy methods for in-field monitoring of deployed ML models, and detect improvements or regressions after a model update, for an ML system serving millions of rides.
• Build resilient and high performing teams through people development and hiring.
• Contribute to the development of technical roadmaps (defining team OKRs, developing believable plans to achieve the OKRs), and drive the roadmap execution.
• Make project staffing decisions, technical decisions, and drive escalations; ultimately accountable for delivering projects.

What You Have (Minimum Qualifications)

• Bachelor's in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of deep learning experience.
• 5+ years experience in Machine Learning and/or Computer Vision.
• 2+ years in managing ML engineering or research teams.
• Experience with Python.
• Experience with ML frameworks like PyTorch or JAX.

What We Prefer (Preferred Qualifications)

• MS or PhD Degree in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science or a similar discipline.
• Publications at top-tier conferences like CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, ICRA, RSS, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCV, PAMI.
• Experience with C++.
• Experience with real-time system design.

Salary and Benefits

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

$238,000—$302,000 USD

Key skills/competency

• Machine Learning
• Computer Vision
• Deep Learning
• Perception Systems
• Model Deployment
• Data Selection
• ML Monitoring
• Team Leadership
• Technical Roadmap
• Python