Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Vehicle Interaction & Behavior Policy ML
Waymo Open · verified Oct 22, 2026 At a glance
Senior Machine Learning Engineering role at Waymo. Mountain View · $213,000–$263,000 base.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build and test learned driving policies for difficult navigation and yielding situations, then prepare them for release
- Connect perception outputs with planning needs to produce dependable behavioral decisions
- Run learned models in closed-loop simulations, measure them against safety criteria, and move qualified models toward production
- Replace rule-based driving heuristics with policies learned from data
What you bring
- At least two years training and shipping machine-learning models in autonomous driving, robotics, or complex spatial AI
- Practical work spanning both perception and planning, with experience in learned driving policies such as reinforcement or imitation learning
- Proficiency with PyTorch or JAX, closed-loop simulator testing, and taking models into production
Who this fits
This senior role suits an engineer who has worked across perception and planning and can carry learned driving models from evaluation into release. You'll report to a technical lead manager in a hybrid role based in Mountain View.
From the employer
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