Tech Lead Manager Foundation Models

Research Director, AI Foundations

About

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. The Waymo AI Foundations team develops machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving, towards the goal of 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. AI Foundations areas that we are currently focusing on include reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, generative modeling, Bayesian inference, hierarchical learning, and robust evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Lead and manage a team to build large-scale foundation models, powering many offboard and onboard applications for the Waymo Driver.
• Set the technical direction for the team, develop the execution strategies, and align individual efforts with the overall strategies.
• Develop a collaborative relationship with cross-functional teams across Waymo, including simulation, planner, semantics, and ML infrastructure.
• Establish an inclusive culture for the team, enabling research innovations and delivering impactful results.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience managing medium-size teams.
• Track record in developing team culture and growing people.
• 6+ years experience in deep learning research or applied research.
• Technical experience working with LLMs / VLMs or world models.
• Strong background in foundation model related domains, such as pretraining, mid-training, post-training, Transformer modeling, model scaling, self-supervised learning.
• Experience working with productionizing deep learning models.