Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Vehicle Interaction & Behavior Policy ML

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.