Staff Technical Lead Manager, Machine Learning, Planner

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.

Our team maintains and improves a high impact system that is a critical part of Waymo's Planner. You will work at the intersection of robotics and modern ML, collaborating across our teams, to build solutions that can handle situations from everyday driving to ones that happen once in a million miles.

In this hybrid role, you will report to an Engineering Manager within Planner.

You will:

• Own and improve the onboard ML model for trajectory scoring and ranking.
• Management of a team of MLEs focused on model quality improvements
• Provide technical leadership to improve planner ML models for both short-term product improvements, as well as long-term experimentation
• Investigate driving behavior issues from logs and understand the root cause
• Improve performance of the state of the art ML models in Planner
• Expand the impact of ML models while preserving interpretability and behavioral guarantees
• Provide mentorship for junior engineers on the team

You have:

• Masters or PhD degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning or a similar discipline.
• Proficiency in Python or C++
• Experience with Machine Learning models in production systems, particularly ranking and scoring systems
• Proven leadership experience guiding an ML team in meeting company objectives

We prefer:

• AV or Robotics experience
• 8+ years of Software Engineering experience in complex systems

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.