Staff Research Scientist, Foundation Models Recipes
$251,000–$310,000 year
HybridMountain View Santa Clara County, California, United States
Job Summary
Own the data recipe for Waymo's Foundation Model pre-training and post-training, leading science on clustering, filtering, de-duplication, and long-tail data mining. Tech-lead research engineers to build the data flywheel using Waymo's massive driving dataset, while integrating emerging research for rigorous ablations and scaling ladders. Engage with the wider community to refine data-centric evaluation and partner with engineering teams to share techniques that accelerate collective know-how. This hybrid role reports to a Senior Director of AI Foundations, focusing on reinforcement learning, generative modeling, and robust evaluation to safely operate vehicles in dozens of cities.
Required Qualifications
- PhD or Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a similar technical field
- 3+ years of industry or post-doc research experience in Data-centric AI, Reinforcement Learning or Foundation Models
- Demonstration of original contributions to the field through high-impact publications (ArXiv, peer-reviewed conferences like NeurIPS/ICLR/CVPR), technical blog posts, or significant open-source contributions
- Proficiency and in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of an ML framework (e.g. Pytorch, JAX, Tensorflow)
- Own the data recipe for Waymo's Foundation Model pre-training and post-training
- Lead and drive science on best practices around clustering, filtering, de-duplication, long-tail data mining, memorization, etc.
- Tech-lead a team of research engineers to build the data flywheel to enable the above from Waymo's massive driving data
- Integrate emerging research from the broader community to do rigorous ablations and promising data research techniques
- Scaling ladders for pre-training, data mix optimizations and RL recipes (preferences) for post-training
- Engage with the wider research community on best practices around data centric evaluation creation and refinement
- Partner with engineering and research teams across Waymo to share recipes, techniques, and post-training best practices to accelerate our collective know-how
Desired Qualifications
- Extensive experience working with data and recipes for large scale foundation models
- ML infra experience: training, evaluating and deploying ML models at scale
- Deep learning experience, especially with generative models, e.g., LLMs/VLMs, and/or reinforcement learning
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