Senior Machine Learning Engineer, LLM/VLM Evaluation

Waymo's AI Foundations team is driving the development of evaluation systems and benchmarks for Waymo's next-generation multimodal foundation models. As a Senior ML Engineer specializing in LLM/VLM Evaluation, you'll own the end-to-end lifecycle of model evaluation — from pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL) — assessing the quality, safety, and realism of embodied AI agents in autonomous driving contexts. In this role, you will design and implement cutting-edge models and algorithms for spatial-temporal visual reasoning in autonomous driving scenarios. You'll develop robust training and evaluation pipelines for VLM models focused on metrics relevant to decision-making rationale and free-form question answering. You'll also analyze large-scale sensor data to identify key challenges and opportunities for improving LLM/VLM performance in real-world driving environments. This position is available in Mountain View, CA, Kirkland, WA, and New York City, NY. You'll be collaborating with world-class researchers and engineers at the frontier of autonomous driving and multimodal AI, with access to one of the largest real-world driving datasets in existence.