Technical Lead Manager, Foundation Model Post-Training

Job Description

Lead a team of research scientists within Waymo’s Applied Research group to adapt foundation models (LLMs, VLMs, multimodal models) for autonomous vehicle planning. Focus on post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning, RL-based alignment, data curation, and inference-time scaling.

Responsibilities

• Plan and execute a research agenda for adapting foundation models to AV planning
• Lead and mentor a team of research scientists working on post-training and inference-time techniques
• Drive work on data curation, SFT, RL-based alignment, sampling and search (e.g., MCTS), and distillation
• Partner with other orgs to land research outputs in production AV planners
• Publish at top-tier conferences and represent Waymo’s research externally

Benefits