Staff Machine Learning Infrastructure Engineer, Simulation

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the 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 One, a fully autonomous ride-hailing service, and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over one million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving tens of millions of miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 13+ U.S. states.

The Simulation Machine Learning Infrastructure team builds scalable AI/ML infrastructure to accelerate the Simulator team in sustainably innovating and building state-of-the-art simulations of realistic environments for the testing and training of the Waymo Driver. To increase the fidelity and steerability of the simulations, we employ large foundation models trained on massive datasets to model the real world, including realistic agents (vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists), roads, traffic control systems, and weather.

We are looking for an experienced Staff Machine Learning Infrastructure Engineer to lead the development of advanced AI/ML infrastructure for multi-billion parameter foundation models in ML accelerator-friendly simulations. Your expertise in massive model scaling, ML accelerators, and distributed training will be required for designing and scaling our systems.

This role reports to an Engineering Manager.

In this role, you’ll:

• Be part of a world-class, research engineering team to improve the ultra-realistic multi-agent simulations using foundation models.
• Collaborate with the core Waymo Realism Modeling team in London and Waymo Oxford to use large foundation models to improve simulation realism.
• Provide deep technical leadership on large-scale ML model architectures, especially for autonomous vehicle models. Work at the intersection of data engineering, model development, and simulations, and provide guidance on architectural decisions and technical directions. Manage complex systems, driving architectures that meet technical and business goals.
• Design and scale large distributed systems covering the ML lifecycle, supporting planet-scale dataset generation, model training, and evaluation.
• Collaborate to derive performance and system-level requirements for large ML systems. Translate product/business goals into measurable technical deliverables, ensuring system component agreement.
• Mentor junior engineers, growing their expertise and promoting a collaborative culture.

Preferred qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in machine learning infrastructure such as developing, scaling, training, deploying, and optimizing large-scale machine learning systems from data to model.
• Solid experience in the development and optimization of machine learning infrastructure tools like DeepSpeed, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Ray, or similar frameworks.
• Expertise in distributed training techniques, including gradient sharding and optimization strategies for scaling large models across ML accelerator profiling tools to uncover performance bottlenecks. Familiarity with custom kernels for compute-based efficiency.
• Experience with state-of-the-art machine learning models such as autoregressive transformers.
• Experience navigating cross-functional teams and providing technical leadership on projects across multiple organizations.
• Ability to translate complex technical concepts for a broad audience.
• Practical familiarity in Autonomous Driving, Simulations, and ML accelerators is a plus.

The expected base salary range for this full-time position 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. 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: £145,000 — £157,000 GBP

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