Senior Staff Research Engineer, Model Post Training

We are seeking highly motivated and talented experienced engineers to join our team to lead the post-training LLM for autonomous driving. You will be working alongside a world-class team of researchers and engineers to develop and advance the next generation of frontier AI models.

You will: 

• Post-training for instruction following and CoT thinking: Develop and apply methods to enhance the instruction following and CoT abilities of LLM models targeting autonomous driving applications. This may include fine-tuning strategies, reinforcement learning techniques, or novel approaches to improve LLM’s ability to solve complex driving tasks, make decisions, and interact with dynamic environments.
• Collaborate deeply with research teams asking the right technical questions, translating research advances into production-ready systems, and shaping joint technical direction.
• Provide technical leadership to influence senior engineers and researchers across ML, infra, and data teams.
• Raise the technical bar for how Waymo trains, evaluates, and deploys LLM models in the autonomous driving technical stack.
  
  

You have:

• Demonstrated experience developing post-training methods for LLM models
• Extensive experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, JAX) and large-scale model training.
• A track record of operating effectively under ambiguity, setting direction amid rapidly evolving research and technical constraints
• The ability to translate research insights into production-ready post-training pipelines and systems
• Experience applying large language models or foundation models in complex, safety-critical domains (e.g., autonomy, robotics, or other high-reliability systems)
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills