Technical Lead Manager, Perception, Traffic Control Understanding

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.

Waymo is solving one of the most complex challenges in autonomous driving: understanding the dynamic, unspoken rules of the road. The Scene Understanding team is at the forefront of this mission, tasked with generating real-time, scene-level semantic representations of the world - moving beyond individual bounding boxes to understand construction zones, temporary traffic controls, and complex road graphs.

As a TLM for Scene Understanding, you will act as a true "player-coach" for a team of roughly 6-10 engineers. This is a high impact role, where your models will directly dictate how the Waymo Driver reacts to complex, unstructured environments like active construction zones and temporary traffic signs. This work is critical to Waymo's ability to scale into new cities, across the US and internationally.

In this hybrid role you will report to a Sr Staff Technical Lead Manager.

You will:

• Own a specific domain within scene understanding, such as traffic controls or construction zones, and work with product and safety partners on short- and long-term improvements in support of Waymo’s scaling goals

• Lead the analysis of real-world scene understanding issues to develop technical roadmaps and drive the roadmap execution,

• Build resilient and high performing teams through people development and hiring,

• Make project staffing decisions, technical decisions, drive escalations; ultimately accountable for delivering projects.

You have:

• Bachelors in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of deep learning experience

• 7+ years of experience building and deploying deep learning/computer vision models in production environments, ideally within the AV or robotics space

• 2-3+ years of experience directly managing and scaling engineering/research teams (managing 5+ reports)

• Fluency in Python, C++, and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, JAX)

We prefer:

• MS or PhD Degree in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science or a similar discipline

• Publications at top-tier conferences like CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS,.

• Experience with C++

• Experience with real-time system design

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.

Salary Range $251,000—$310,000 USD