Machine Learning Engineer, Perception LLM/VLM (Ph.D. New Grad) at Waymo

Job Description

Waymo’s Perception team is hiring new Ph.D. graduates as machine learning engineers to work on large language and vision-language models for perception. The team learns spatial and temporal representations of the world around the car from millions of miles of multi-sensor data, and this role builds large-scale continual pre-training pipelines for such models.

At a glance

• Team: Perception
• Location: Mountain View or San Francisco
• Level: Ph.D. new graduate
• Pay: From $170,000 a year base, as listed
• Apply: open until filled (re-checked 14 October 2026)

What you would do

• Design, implement and optimise large-scale continual pre-training pipelines for LLM/VLM-based perception
• Develop methods to learn efficiently and continuously from real-world driving data
• Train models at scale and optimise them for onboard and offboard hardware
• Work with downstream teams to integrate models into the Waymo Driver

Why this role matters

New-graduate Ph.D. roles at frontier AI companies are rare and competitive. This one applies the latest vision-language methods to a deployed system with huge amounts of real sensor data, which is a strong way to turn a Ph.D. in multimodal learning into industry impact.

What Waymo is looking for

• A recent or upcoming Ph.D. in machine learning, computer vision or a related field
• Research experience with large language or vision-language models
• Strong coding skills for large-scale training

Nice to have

• Publications in computer vision or multimodal learning

Pay and location

Waymo’s posting gives a base salary range starting at $170,000 a year, plus bonus, equity and benefits; the exact range depends on location.

How to apply

Apply through the official Waymo job posting. Waymo’s posting does not give a closing date, so the role is open until filled; ResearchJobs.in will re-check this listing on 14 October 2026. Check the posting for location and work-authorisation details before you apply.

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