Technical Lead Manager, Perception, Vehicle Understanding

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 Semantics Understanding team is tackling the "last 1%" of autonomous driving perception. In this role, you will own the production modules related to Vehicle Understanding for the Waymo Driver. This area includes vehicles' fine-grained classification (e.g., emergency, railed, construction, towing), states (e.g., warning, temporal blockage, active loading/unloading), and intents (e.g., lane-changes, stalled/slow, double-parking, unparking). Being on the critical path of Waymo's domestic/international expansion, you will drive immediate impact and the 0-to-1 changes that push boundaries of the Waymo Driver's generalizability.


In this hybrid role, you will report to our Senior Staff TLM of Semantics Understanding.

You Will:

• Lead a team responsible for a key production area to scale Waymo's business
• Develop a strong collaborative relationship with upstream and downstream teams to facilitate the end-to-end solutions for the corresponding product domains
• Exercise technical leadership by pushing the boundaries of onboard/offboard generalizability, e.g., by leveraging onboard/offboard multi-modal foundational models, large-scale 3rd party data, and partner teams in Research, Oracles, and Simulation.
• Manage a team (~10) with diverse skills including engineering, modeling, ML infrastructure, of senior and junior SWEs, foster an inclusive culture for sustained team growth, and hiring world-class talents.
• Collaborate with Platform/Infra partners to optimize the team's key pipelines (e.g., data, training, evaluation, onboard) for high performance, efficiency, and reliability.
• Develop the execution strategies that balance short-term and long-term priorities. Drive process and clarify R&Rs for cross-organizational alignments.

You Have:

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning or related disciplines
• 7+ years of experience in deep learning systems, specifically in computer vision, or multi-modal perception
• 3+ years of experience managing medium-sized (10+ people) production teams in complex, fast-paced environments with a track record in developing team culture and growing people.
• Experience in collaborating with technical, research and business stakeholders to drive impactful solutions.

We Prefer:

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning or related disciplines
• Publications in top CV conferences (NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, etc.)
• Experience in the autonomous vehicles industry

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

$251,000-$310,000 USD