Senior ML Engineer, LLM / VLM Distillation

Job Summary

Waymo is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer specializing in Large Language Model (LLM) and Vision‑Language Model (VLM) distillation to join its research team in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, US. This role focuses on creating efficient, high‑performance models that power Waymo’s autonomous driving stack.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement distillation pipelines for LLMs and VLMs to reduce model size while preserving accuracy.
• Collaborate with perception, planning, and mapping teams to integrate distilled models into the Waymo Driver.
• Develop evaluation metrics and benchmarking tools to measure latency, memory footprint, and safety-critical performance.
• Publish research findings internally and contribute to open‑source communities where appropriate.
• Mentor junior engineers and guide best practices in model compression, quantization, and hardware‑aware optimization.

Required Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field with a focus on machine learning.
• 5+ years of hands‑on experience building, training, and deploying large‑scale LLMs or VLMs.
• Strong programming skills in Python and expertise with deep‑learning frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Proven track record of publishing research or delivering production‑ready model compression solutions.
• Experience with GPU/TPU optimization, quantization, and knowledge distillation techniques.

Preferred Skills

• Familiarity with autonomous vehicle perception pipelines.
• Knowledge of reinforcement learning, multimodal data processing, and real‑time inference.
• Experience with cloud platforms (Google Cloud, AWS) and CI/CD for ML models.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary range: $213,000 – $263,000 annually, plus equity, health benefits, and generous paid time off.

How to Apply

Submit your resume and a brief cover letter highlighting relevant projects through Waymo’s careers portal.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does LLM/VLM distillation involve?

Distillation reduces the size of large language or vision‑language models while keeping performance, enabling faster inference on autonomous driving hardware.

Do I need autonomous‑driving experience?

Direct experience is not required, but knowledge of perception or planning pipelines is a strong plus.

What is the salary range for this position?

The base salary ranges from $213,000 to $263,000, plus equity and comprehensive benefits.