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# Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Vehicle Interaction & Behavior Policy ML

- **Company:** Waymo LLC
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $213,000.0 - $263,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Pytorch, Data Analytics
- **Published:** September 12, 2026
- **Apply:** https://jobs.localjobnetwork.com/apply/add/88206160/1

## About the Role

* 2-5+ years experience training and releasing ML models in autonomous driving, robotics, or complex spatial AI.
 * Hands-on experience working across both perception and planning stacks. Proficiency in learned driving policies (RL / imitation learning), PyTorch / JAX, closed-loop simulator evaluation, and a track record of releasing models to production.
 * Familiarity with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and World Models is a strong plus
 * Experience using foundation models and AI tools for scenario generation, evaluation analysis, and rapid experimentation.

## Description

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's 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's fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

Role overview:Autonomy MLE role focused on bridging perception and planning to develop and release robust learned driving policies. The primary objective of this role is to train, evaluate, and transition production-ready decision-making models into real-world autonomous navigation systems.

In this hybrid role, you will report to the Technical Lead Manager.

You will:

 * Develop, evaluate, and release learned driving policies for complex navigation and yielding scenarios.
 * Work cross-functionally at the intersection of perception and planning, translating multi-modal perception outputs into robust behavioral actions.
 * Deploy learned models into closed-loop simulation environments, benchmark against strict safety metrics, and drive the transition of these models into production releases.
 * Advance the transition from rule-based heuristics to scalable, data-driven learned policies.


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