Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Vehicle Interaction & Behavior Policy ML

Mountain View, CAHybridFull TimeSenior$213,000–$263,000 /yrPosted 2 months agoVisa sponsorship available

Is this role right for you?

Upload your resume and get a skill-by-skill breakdown — see exactly where you match, where you're close, and what to highlight. Not a mystery percentage.

Get a tailored resume highlighting what this role needs.

Required skills

Multimodal Perception
Semantic Reasoning
Learned Driving Policies
Perception
Planning
PyTorch
JAX
Closed-loop Simulation
Production Releases
RL

Nice to have

Vision-Language-Action Models
World Models
Foundation Models
Scenario Generation
Evaluation Analysis
Rapid Experimentation

Role summary

The Special Vehicle Compliance team is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to focus on multimodal perception, semantic reasoning, and driving intelligence for autonomous vehicles. This hybrid role involves developing, evaluating, and releasing learned driving policies by bridging perception and planning. You will deploy models into closed-loop simulation, benchmark safety metrics, and transition them to production. The ideal candidate has 2-5+ years of experience in ML model training and release within autonomous driving, robotics, or spatial AI, with proficiency in PyTorch/JAX, closed-loop simulation, and production deployment. Familiarity with VLA models, World Models, and foundation models is a plus.

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.

Role overview: Autonomy MLE role focused on bridging perception and planning to develop and release robust learned driving policies. The primary objective of this role is to train, evaluate, and transition production-ready decision-making models into real-world autonomous navigation systems.

In this hybrid role, you will report to the Technical Lead Manager.

You will:

Develop, evaluate, and release learned driving policies for complex navigation and yielding scenarios.

Work cross-functionally at the intersection of perception and planning, translating multi-modal perception outputs into robust behavioral actions.

Deploy learned models into closed-loop simulation environments, benchmark against strict safety metrics, and drive the transition of these models into production releases.

Advance the transition from rule-based heuristics to scalable, data-driven learned policies.

You have:

2–5+ years experience training and releasing ML models in autonomous driving, robotics, or complex spatial AI.

Hands-on experience working across both perception and planning stacks. Proficiency in learned driving policies (RL / imitation learning), PyTorch / JAX, closed-loop simulator evaluation, and a track record of releasing models to production.

Familiarity with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and World Models is a strong plus

Experience using foundation models and AI tools for scenario generation, evaluation analysis, and rapid experimentation.

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$213,000—$263,000 USD

Sample Waymo interview questions

1
Design a data ingestion system
system designmedium
2
Design a simulation-based regression detection system for code changes
system designhard
3
Longest Substring with Two Distinct Characters Find the longest substring with at most two distinct characters. Input: s = "ccaabbb" Output: 5 Explanation: The substring "aabbb" contains exactly two distinct characters and has a maximum length of 5.
codingmedium
4
Alien Dictionary Order Derive the alien dictionary order from a sorted list of alien words. Input: words = ["z","x","z"] Output: "" (Empty String) Explanation: The letter 'z' cannot come before 'x' and then suddenly after 'x', creating a cycle and making the dictionary invalid.
codingmedium
5
Palindrome After Deleting One Character Determine if a string can be a palindrome after deleting at most one character. Input: s = "abc" Output: FALSE Explanation: Deleting any single character leaves either "ab", "bc", or "ac", none of which result in a valid palindrome.
codingmedium

Get started to unlock a personalized interview prep pack for this role.

Ready to apply?

You'll be redirected to Waymo's application page.