Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo One, a fully autonomous ride-hailing service, and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over one million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving tens of millions of miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 13+ U.S. states.
The Perception Data team is the core function responsible for understanding vast amounts of Waymo driving data, curating them into datasets, and ensuring their availability and quality to accelerate Perception and development of the Waymo Driver. This includes areas such as efficient real-time onboard data selection, scalable data engine systems to power Perception's onboard models and foundation models, and large-scale data generation pipelines for Perception model development.
You will report to our Head of Perception.
You will:
- Keep close track and build understanding of evolving business and technology needs on data, including those that serve Waymo's product goals and foundation models
- Create data strategies that orchestrate the many facets involving data delivery: on-car real-time data sampling, offline data sampling, mining and sampling capabilities, data curation efficiency and quality, human labeling vs. autolabeling efficiency and quality tradeoffs, large-scale data generation systems, and storage
- Set up and evolve the working structure between multiple teams across Waymo, where we maximize reuse of infrastructure and tooling
- Responsible for ongoing delivery of diverse, fresh, and high-quality data for Perception's development, evaluation and model training
- Develop both data technologies and data tooling to support Waymo's increasing scale, and to support the diverse and advanced data requirements
You have:
- Track record in leading Data organizations that supported successful and large-scale products relying on ML, or
- Track record in leading a successful and large-scale quality-driven product that depends on the quality of data for its ML development
- Experience and mindset in working backwards from business goals to form the data strategies, while being extremely customer-focused - being a partner to the customer teams in shaping the best data plan for them together, and deliver
- Experience working leading horizontal programs
- Technical ability to dive deep into technical details, including complex systems, infrastructure, algorithms, and modeling techniques
We prefer:
- Experience leading ML-heavy quality-driven products, therefore having first-hand experience as users of data for ML development
- Familiarity with the data needs of computer vision models and VLMs
- Experience in data science to systematically understand the significance of data
#LI-Hybrid
The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is listed below. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the role location or, if the role can be performed remote, the specific salary range for your preferred location, during the hiring process.
Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.
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