Waymo is the self-driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to move around. Building on software and sensor technology developed at Google, Waymo is now launching the world’s first fully self-driving transportation service that will take members of the public from A to B at the touch of a button.

The mission of the Waymo Research team is to develop machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving, towards the goal of the safely operating Waymo vehicles in dozens of cities and under all driving conditions. As part of our work, we also initiate and foster collaborations with other research teams in Alphabet. Research areas that we are currently focusing on include perception, behavior prediction and reinforcement learning.

In this Research Engineer role, you will:

• Research new machine learning problems, models and algorithms
• Collaborate on deploying these models on the Waymo vehicles
• Initiate and support collaborations with Alphabet researchers on autonomous driving-related research topics
• We expect your scope to grow over time as you become an expert in some of the machine learning research areas above, and you’ll be initiating and leading increasingly ambitious new projects

We'd like you to have:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science or related quantitative field, or B.S./M.S. in Computer Science or related quantitative field with 5+ years of relevant experience
• Experience as a self-directed engineer / research scientist who excels at driving new research ideas from conception and experimentation to productionization
• Strong knowledge of machine learning; experience with machine learning research and the experiment-launch-iterate cycle in one or more projects
• Outstanding technical leadership and communication skills to lead new research areas and multi-team collaborations
• Strong programming skills in C++ or Python
• Experience with distributed computing (MapReduce, Flume, etc)

Preferred qualifications:

• Expertise in one or more of the following areas is a plus: deep learning, computer vision, robotics, reinforcement learning, behavior prediction, SLAM
• Research experience and publications in machine learning or related fields is a plus
• Experience of using TensorFlow or similar large-scale machine learning systems in production is a plus.
• Tech Lead experience is a plus