Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Vehicle Interaction & Behavior Policy ML
Company websitewaymo.com (Waymo, opens in new tab)
Base salary $213K to $263K
Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in Mountain View, CA
You apply on the employer's own site. Six Figure Work does not handle applications.
- LocationMountain View, CA
- WorkplaceWorkplace not stated
- Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
- Last checked (1 h ago) · observed since
About this job
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.
Role overview: Autonomy MLE role focused on bridging perception and planning to develop and release robust learned driving policies. The primary objective of this role is to train, evaluate, and transition production-ready decision-making models into real-world autonomous navigation systems.
In this hybrid role, you will report to the Technical Lead Manager.
You will:
- Develop, evaluate, and release learned driving policies for complex navigation and yielding scenarios.
- Work cross-functionally at the intersection of perception and planning, translating multi-modal perception outputs into robust behavioral actions.
- Deploy learned models into closed-loop simulation environments, benchmark against strict safety metrics, and drive the transition of these models into production releases.
- Advance the transition from rule-based heuristics to scalable, data-driven learned policies.
You have:
- 2–5+ years experience training and releasing ML models in autonomous driving, robotics, or complex spatial AI.
- Hands-on experience working across both perception and planning stacks. Proficiency in learned driving policies (RL / imitation learning), PyTorch / JAX, closed-loop simulator evaluation, and a track record of releasing models to production.
- Familiarity with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and World Models is a strong plus
- Experience using foundation models and AI tools for scenario generation, evaluation analysis, and rapid experimentation.
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
$213,000—$263,000 USD
Source: Waymo on Greenhouse · View original posting (opens in new tab)
Pay in context
This role's base floor ($213,000) is above 67% of the 1,514 Data & ML roles in California listed on this site; 14 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $187,500; the middle half runs from $159,200 to $229,375.
Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 7, 2026.
This listingSenior Machine Learning Engineer, Vehicle Interaction & Behavior Policy ML$213K to $263K
Senior Software Engineer, Fleet Response Infrastructure$213K to $263K
Senior Data Scientist, Simulation Capacity Optimization$213K to $263K
Research Scientist, Map Scalability$213K to $263K
Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Scenes, Traffic Controls$213K to $263K
Senior Software Engineer, Chassis$213K to $263K
Associate Counsel, Regulatory$213K to $263K
Chart as a table
| Role | Published base |
|---|---|
| Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Vehicle Interaction & Behavior Policy ML (this listing) | $213K - $263K |
| Senior Software Engineer, Fleet Response Infrastructure | $213K - $263K |
| Senior Data Scientist, Simulation Capacity Optimization | $213K - $263K |
| Research Scientist, Map Scalability | $213K - $263K |
| Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Scenes, Traffic Controls | $213K - $263K |
| Senior Software Engineer, Chassis | $213K - $263K |
| Associate Counsel, Regulatory | $213K - $263K |
Observed changes
- First observed on the employer's board
- Began meeting the published-salary criteria
- Observed since
- Employer-stated posting date
- 2026-08-31
Where this pay comes from
Location as the employer wrote it: Mountain View, California, USA
$213,000—$263,000 USD
- Method
- Employer text, read with fixed rules and re-verified
- Checked
- Rule set
- us-base-v2
The pay passage appears in the employer's own job text. Fixed, deterministic rules located it, and the passage below was checked against the stored copy of the posting.
What we verified
- The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
- The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
- The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.
We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.