{"id":2409855,"url":"https://alion.io/job/waymo-machine-learning-engineer-perception-llmvlm-phd-new-grad","title":"Machine Learning Engineer, Perception, Vision-Language Models","company":{"id":98,"name":"Waymo","domain":"waymo.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/waymo","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":81,"open_postings":120,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.55,"repost_share":0.008,"time_to_fill_p50_days":76,"computed_at":"2026-11-10T06:52:35Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"junior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Mountain View, United States","San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":170000,"max":216000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":216000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":2,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"JAX","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Quantization","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"RLHF","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-12-22T23:35:42Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-04","last_verified_at":"2026-11-10T06:45:53Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":322,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":322},"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.\nThe Semantics Onboard team is a specialized subgroup within the Perception organization at Waymo. Our mission is to bring the immense reasoning power and innate world knowledge of massive foundation models directly onto the Waymo Driver. We focus on building an onboard multi-task, multimodal perception model designed to tackle highly complex and unpredictable \"long-tail\" scenarios.\nBy leveraging advanced model distillation and quantization, we empower the autonomous system with zero-shot and few-shot generalization to adapt to rare edge cases safely and reliably. Our work is at the absolute cutting edge of autonomous safety, turning cloud-scale reasoning into real-time, onboard intelligence without sacrificing the strict computational and latency constraints of the vehicle.\nYou will:\nArchitect and train large-scale, onboard ML perception models that are instrumental to ensuring vehicle safety and regulatory compliance.\nDrive cross-functional collaboration to engineer robust, high-reliability training pipelines within a dynamic, rapid-delivery environment.\nLeverage deep computer vision expertise to design novel, custom architectures from first principles to solve complex perception challenges.\nContribute to a vibrant and positive team culture where diverse skill sets and backgrounds are valued. \nYou have:\nBS or MS in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field.\nFluency in Python or C++, with deep hands-on expertise in PyTorch or Jax for matrix manipulation and module implementation.\nDeep understanding and proven practical experience with model distillation frameworks and quantization techniques for real-time compute constraints.\nDemonstrated hands-on experience building, training, or deploying Multimodal Foundation Models or Vision-Language Models (VLMs).\nWe prefer:\nPhD in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field.\n2+ years of applied industry experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or complex ML systems.\nHands-on experience managing and optimizing large-scale teacher-student training loops.\nA proven track record of successfully deploying Vision-Language queries in highly constrained, real-time environments.\nExperience with large-scale distributed training, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), or Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) for Foundation Models and VLMs.\nDeep expertise in long-context temporal reasoning for sequential decision-making or complex video understanding.\nFirst-author publications in premier computer vision and machine learning conferences, such as CVPR, NeurIPS, ICCV, or ECCV.\nThe 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. \nWaymo 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. \nSalary Range\n$170,000—$216,000 USD","description_format":"text","description_chars":3991,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":2,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Autonomous Driving","Smart Mobility","Ride Hailing"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-13T01:49:48Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"adverts_offering_sponsorship_24m":0,"sanctioned_now":false,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 331 · green card filings: 28","filings_12m":331,"filings_prev_12m":227,"green_card_filings_12m":28,"median_offered_wage_usd":206330,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-09T07:32:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":261}],"liveness":{"score":5,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.18,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":322,"expected_fill_days":76,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:junior,brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-10T06:52:35Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":216000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/waymo-machine-learning-engineer-perception-llmvlm-phd-new-grad","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/waymo-machine-learning-engineer-perception-llmvlm-phd-new-grad.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-10T11:10:31Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":25910,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-11T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":98},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=98"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fwaymo-machine-learning-engineer-perception-llmvlm-phd-new-grad"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fwaymo-machine-learning-engineer-perception-llmvlm-phd-new-grad"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fwaymo-machine-learning-engineer-perception-llmvlm-phd-new-grad"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/waymo-machine-learning-engineer-perception-llmvlm-phd-new-grad\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fwaymo-machine-learning-engineer-perception-llmvlm-phd-new-grad"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":2409855}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"waymo.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":2409855},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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