---
title: 'Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Perception, Simulation Realism at Waymo'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-perception-simulation-realism-waymo-twcqyqk49hts'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-11'
---

# Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Perception, Simulation Realism at Waymo

- **Company:** Waymo
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA / San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $298k–$368k
- **Posted:** 2026-11-04
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-11
- **Apply:** https://careers.withwaymo.com/jobs?gh_jid=8351491

## Job description

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.

About the Team: The "Oracle" for Autonomous Driving

Our mission is to build the high-fidelity, platform-agnostic Ground Truth (GT) engine that powers the next generation of autonomous vehicle (AV) simulation and evaluation. We function as the "Oracle"—by reprocessing onboard logs offline using state-of-the-art ML Foundation Models, we generate semantic signals that significantly outperform real-time onboard software.

Since our inception in early 2025, we have moved from concept to a fully operational end-to-end ML solution. As we head into 2027, we are scaling this "Oracle" to become the backbone of all large-scale evaluation, enabling the business to test software at a level of rigor and realism previously thought impossible.

## The Role

We are looking for a strategic technical leader to drive the ML perception architecture for Sim GroundTruth. This role sits at the critical intersection of cutting-edge perception ML research, foundation models, and massive-scale offline data engineering. As a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will serve as the chief technical authority for our perception models, guiding and mentoring ML engineers to solve the "technical moat" of high-fidelity 3D perception and ML inference at a petabyte scale.

## Key Responsibilities

- Scalable ML Architecture & Signal Expansion: Architect a modular, extensible ML framework capable of rapidly absorbing a growing list of complex signal requirements. You will lead the transition from specialized models to unified Foundation Model architectures that maintain "Oracle" quality while scaling to hundreds of new semantic categories.
- Strategic Ownership & Quality Leadership: Define the multi-year roadmap for signal quality, coverage, and reliability. Your mandate is to ensure our signals don’t just match onboard software—they set the industry benchmark for ground truth accuracy.
- ML Scale & Inference Efficiency: Lead the optimization of high-fidelity perception model inference and compute efficiency across massive, petabyte-scale datasets, collaborating with backend infrastructure leads to support rigorous, high-frequency evaluation.
- Stakeholder & Ecosystem Growth: Act as the primary interface for "Application Owners" across the company. You will translate complex simulation needs into technical requirements and aggressively grow our customer base to ensure every major software launch is "Oracle-validated."
- Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Serve as the senior technical leader and mentor for ML perception engineers, championing modeling best practices, architectural rigor, and driving technical execution on mission-critical P0 perception initiatives.

## Requirements

- Education: Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field (PhD preferred).
- Technical Leadership: Proven track record of senior technical leadership setting technical vision, architecting complex ML systems, and mentoring senior engineers and research scientists.
- Cross-Stakeholder Alignment: Proven track record of navigating complex organizations to gather requirements from diverse customers and aligning them into a unified technical roadmap. You can negotiate Roles & Responsibilities (R&R) across competing priorities.
- Technical Depth: Hands-on experience with an ability to technically lead ICs daily, including deep knowledge of codebases, eval/data pipelines, and model architectures.
- ML & Perception Expertise: Deep understanding of Foundation Models (VLMs or MMLMs) and computer vision / perception architectures (e.g., Transformers, 3D detection, scene reconstruction), specifically in the context of post-training, fine-tuning, or inference-time scaling.
- Proficiency: Expert-level skills in Python, Numpy, and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch or JAX).

## Preferred Qualifications

- Systems Engineering: Experience building and scaling distributed systems or data pipelines at a petabyte scale.
- Object Detection & AV Perception: Deep expertise in 2D and 3D object detection, multi-modal sensor fusion (camera, LiDAR), tracking, and offboard ground-truth generation for autonomous vehicles.
- Software Rigor: Proficiency in C++ and experience with production-grade ML deployment.
- Academic Impact: A strong publication record at top-tier conferences (CVPR, ICRA, NeurIPS) or leadership in major open-source projects.

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 $298,000—$368,000 USD

## About Waymo

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company that develops and operates the Waymo Driver, a self-driving system used for ride-hailing and trucking, with a mission to be the world’s most trusted driver.
- **Entity Type**: Private (subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google)
- **Headquarters**: Mountain View, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2009 (as the Google self-driving car project); became an independent company under Alphabet in 2016
- **Founders**: The project was initiated by Sebastian Thrun (Google X), with key early contributions from Anthony Levandowski and others. Current leadership is Co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, and Chief Safety Officer Mauricio Peña.

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Autonomous vehicles, self-driving technology, ride-hailing, autonomous trucking, mobility-as-a-service
- **Target customers**: B2C (riders via Waymo One), B2B (fleet operators, logistics companies, and partners), and enterprise (autonomous trucking and delivery)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “To be the world’s most trusted driver.” Waymo aims to save lives, drive inclusive mobility, and improve the state of the planet by making transportation safer, more accessible, and sustainable.

## Products & Services
- **Waymo One**: The world’s first commercial autonomous ride-hailing service. Offers fully driverless rides to the public in Metro Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The fleet is now all-electric (Jaguar I-PACE).
- **Waymo Via**: Autonomous trucking and logistics service for freight movement, operating with partners to move goods on highways.
- **Waymo Driver**: The company’s core autonomous driving system (software + hardware stack). It is designed to be integrated into various vehicle platforms for ride-hailing, trucking, and delivery.
- **Waymo Open Dataset**: A publicly available dataset of autonomous driving sensor data, provided to researchers to accelerate breakthroughs in the field.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (as a private subsidiary of Alphabet). Alphabet’s market cap is ~$2 trillion (as of mid-2025). Waymo is considered Alphabet’s most valuable “Other Bet.”
- **Key Metric**: Over 20 million rider-only (fully autonomous) rides served as of early 2025. 94% fewer serious injury crashes compared to human drivers over the same distance in operating cities.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Alphabet Inc. (parent company). Partners include Jaguar Land Rover (vehicle supply), Daimler Trucks (trucking), and various fleet operators and delivery services.
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid geographic expansion (largest fully autonomous service area in the world at 180 sq miles in Phoenix); transition to an all-electric fleet; expansion into Los Angeles and San Francisco; growing public trust (93% rider satisfaction rate); continuous hiring across engineering, operations, and AI.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & scale**: Waymo is the only company operating a fully autonomous, commercial, paid ride-hailing service across multiple major US cities, with millions of real-world miles driven without a human safety driver.
- **Deep Alphabet backing**: Access to vast resources, AI talent (DeepMind/Google Brain), and infrastructure (Google Maps, Cloud, AI chips).
- **Safety track record**: Publicly released data showing a 82-94% reduction in injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers, building regulatory and public trust.
- **Full-stack approach**: In-house development of hardware (LIDAR, cameras, radar), software (perception, planning, simulation), and operations (fleet management, rider experience).

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling safely**: Expanding service areas (adding more cities and suburbs) while maintaining a strong safety record.
- **All-electric fleet**: Transitioning the entire Waymo One fleet to zero-emission vehicles (Jaguar I-PACE) to align with sustainability goals.
- **Trucking & logistics**: Growing Waymo Via to capture the massive autonomous trucking market, partnering with OEMs and shippers.
- **AI & simulation**: Using advanced AI (including large models and generative AI) to improve the Waymo Driver’s decision-making and simulation-based validation.
- **Accessibility & inclusive mobility**: Designing for riders with disabilities, older adults, and underserved communities to ensure transportation is available to all.

## Why Work Here
- **Impact**: Work on technology that directly saves lives (1.4M traffic deaths globally each year) and reshapes the future of transportation.
- **Culture**: Waymo describes itself as a place for “ambitious thinkers and relentless problem solvers” with a deep respect for getting every detail right. Values include safety, innovation, and responsibility.
- **Teams**: Opportunities across Software Engineering, Hardware Engineering, AI Foundations, Product & Design, Operations & Supply Chain, Safety, Policy, and General & Administrative roles.
- **Internships**: Strong early-career program with internships for Bachelors, Masters, MBA, and PhD candidates, often leading to full-time offers.
- **Hiring process**: Transparent and structured. Includes an initial recruiter screen, 1-2 phone/video interviews, and a virtual onsite (up to 5 interviews). Emphasizes problem-solving, collaboration, and real-time thinking. AI tools are not permitted during technical assessments to ensure fair evaluation.
- **Remote/hybrid policy**: The careers page lists both on-site and remote roles, with most engineering and operations roles based in Mountain View, San Francisco, or other US locations.
- **Benefits**: Top-notch benefits, unique learning opportunities, thoughtful community engagement, and meaningful gatherings. Specific perks are not detailed publicly but are described as comprehensive.

## Sources
1. [Waymo.com](https://waymo.com/) – Official company website (mission, history, safety data)
2. [Waymo About Page](https://waymo.com/about/) – Company history, leadership, and milestones
3. [Waymo Careers Page](https://careers.withwaymo.com/) – Culture, teams, hiring process, benefits
4. [Waymo Open Roles](https://careers.withwaymo.com/jobs/search) – Current job listings and departments
5. [Waymo How We Hire](https://careers.withwaymo.com/how-we-hire) – Interview process, tips, and accessibility

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