Machine Learning Engineer, Simulation Realism

Job Description

Senior machine learning engineer role on Waymo's Simulator Team, building ultra-realistic world simulations for testing and training the Waymo Driver. The role focuses on using foundation models, generative techniques, and reinforcement learning to model agents, environments, and edge-case scenarios for autonomous driving.

Responsibilities

• Develop foundation-model-based simulations of complex real-world driving environments (agents, traffic, weather, road layouts) to test the Waymo Driver
• Advance simulation realism using generative AI and reinforcement learning to model rare or long-horizon behaviors
• Collaborate with foundational AI research teams to bring state-of-the-art models into scalable, production-ready simulation systems
• Optimize training and inference for large models used in simulation, including data pipelines and evaluation metrics
• Work closely with software and autonomy engineers to ensure simulation outputs translate into safer on-road behavior

Benefits