Director, Foundation Model Data Recipes

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Own the data recipe for Waymo's Foundation World Model pre-training and post-training
• ▹Establish data best practices: clustering, filtering, deduplication, long-tail data mining, memorization handling
• ▹Lead a team of research engineers building the data flywheel from Waymo's massive driving data
• ▹Integrate emerging research from the broader community, running rigorous ablations on promising data techniques
• ▹Manage a team of scientists working on pre-training scaling ladders, data mix optimization and post-training RL recipes (preferences)
• ▹Engage with the wider research community on data-centric evaluation creation and refinement
• ▹Partner with engineering and research teams across Waymo to share recipes and best practices

Requirements

• ▹PhD or Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics or a similar technical field, with 5+ years of industry or post-doc research experience in Reinforcement Learning or Foundation Models
• ▹Demonstrated original contributions through high-impact publications (ArXiv, peer-reviewed conferences like NeurIPS/ICLR/CVPR), technical blog posts, or significant open-source contributions
• ▹Experience leading teams of research scientists and engineers to deliver real-world AI impact
• ▹Ability to be hands-on with model development when needed

Nice to have

• ▹Extensive experience working with data and recipes for large-scale foundation models
• ▹PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or Robotics with a research focus on Data-centric AI, Reinforcement Learning, Foundation Models, or Multimodal learning

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Discretionary annual bonus program
• ▹Equity incentive plan
• ▹Generous company benefits program

About the company

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company on a mission to be the world's most trusted driver. Starting as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo built the Waymo Driver, which has completed over ten million rider-only trips and driven over 100 million autonomous miles on public roads across 15+ U.S. states.