Staff Tech Lead, ML Data Infrastructure and Inference Platform

Waymo
Mountain View, CA
Hybrid

Who this role is best for

Aimed at experienced software engineers with ML infrastructure expertise who can manage complex, cross-functional projects in a collaborative, planet-scale environment.

Best fit for

  • Experienced software engineers with ML infrastructure expertise and leadership in distributed systems
    — “Experience with building highly scalable distributed system”
  • Candidates with a background in ML data pipelines and a track record of cross-team collaboration
    — “Experience tech leading projects with high cross team collaboration”

Things to consider

  • The role demands a high level of technical depth in C++ and ML data ecosystems
    — “Experience in programming C++”
  • Handling exabyte-scale data is a key operational requirement for this role
    — “Experience with handling large datasets in the order of exabytes”

How to stand out

  • Demonstrate leadership in onboarding teams to complex infrastructure systems
    — “You will closely lead, mentor and guide a team of engineers to build and onboard teams to the infrastructure efficiently.”
  • Showcase your ability to manage cross-functional projects and align with ML model needs
    — “Work closely with teams across Waymo both onboard & offboard Foundation models, to understand the data infra needs”
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · MediumDecision Impact · Team

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • tech leading projects with high cross team collaboration
  • tech leading a team of engineers on complex projects
  • building and onboarding teams to the infrastructure efficiently
Typical background
6+ years of professional experience in software engineeringexperience with building highly scalable distributed systems

Skills & requirements

Required

C++Distributed SystemsML Data InfrastructureTeam Leadership

Preferred

Handling Large DatasetsBuilding Machine Learning InfrastructureModel Hosting / Inference InfrastructureProduction Services With High QPS

Stack & domain

C++Building Highly Scalable Distributed SystemML Data And ML FlywheelsLeadershipMentoringCollaborationAutonomous DrivingMachine Learning

About the role

Original posting from Waymo

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

The ML Data Infrastructure and Inference Platform team owns the Data as well as the Data infrastructure for all ML Flywheels at Waymo. We do this via a planet scale centralized feature store for all  ML training and evaluation, the feature extraction framework as well the inference platform for generating the data via bulk and online inferences. The objective of the team is to deliver data necessary for all our onboard as well Foundation Models to make the ML Flywheel successful and in turn lead to the successful scaling of Waymo.  The team is highly collaborative and closely works with all modeling teams within Waymo.

You will:

As a Tech Lead you’ll  build, lead and contribute to Waymo’s ML data infrastructure platform to enable planet scale ML Flywheel for all ML models at Waymo via data store and data infra ecosystem.

Work closely with teams across Waymo both onboard & offboard Foundation models, to understand the data infra needs, data distributions, data quality, data value, freshness and onboard these flywheels onto our planet scale data store and ensure the seamless adoption and guide the development of our infra components. 

You will closely lead, mentor and guide a team of engineers to build and onboard teams to the infrastructure efficiently.

The team has a large surface area and scope in terms of impact, cross team collaboration and direct interaction with ML models at Waymo. 

You have:

6+ years of professional experience in the field of software engineering

Experience tech leading projects with high cross team collaboration 

Experience tech leading a team of engineers on complex projects

Experience in programming C++ 

Experience with building highly scalable distributed system

Experience with ML Data and ML Flywheels

We prefer:

Passionate about Data and building ML infra & tools

Experience Tech leading projects, cross functional projects

Experience with handling large datasets in the order of exabytes

Experience building machine learning infrastructure  and model hosting / inference infrastructure

Experience with production services with high QPS.

#LI-Hybrid

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is listed below. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the role location or, if the role can be performed remote, the specific salary range for your preferred location, during the hiring process. 

Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements. 

Salary Range$251,000—$310,000 USD

Source: Waymo careers

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