Senior ML Engineer, LLM / VLM Distillation

Benefits

Parental leave

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Non-birth-parent leave

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Family-building benefits

• Fertility benefits: Not verified
• Adoption assistance: Not verified
• Surrogacy assistance: Not verified

Mental health support

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Relocation assistance

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Childcare support

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Learning budget

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Verification

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Salary

$213K-$263K From the posting source checked Jun 20, 2026

401(k) match

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Market context

U.S. role benchmark (BLS OEWS)

$116,543 U.S. median for this role

Projected growth (BLS Employment Projections)

+9.8% - Much faster than average

104% above the BLS role benchmark for software engineering aggregate.

Matched to SOC 15-1252 - Software Engineering aggregate by role bucket.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS, May 2024 and Employment Projections, 2024-2034.

Role

Role function

Engineering From the posting source checked Jun 20, 2026

Seniority

Senior From the posting source checked Jun 20, 2026

Schedule

Shift type

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Weekend work

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Company

Equity

Offered From the posting source checked Jun 20, 2026

Application

Cover letter

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Assessment

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Deadline

Not stated

Where they hire

State eligibility is not yet verified.

About this role

Senior ML Engineer, LLM / VLM Distillation Mountain View, CA, USA 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 mission of the Waymo AI Foundations team is to develop machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving, towards the goal of safely operating Waymo vehicles in dozens of cities and under all driving conditions. As part of our work, we also initiate and foster collaborations with other research teams in Alphabet. AI Foundations areas that we are currently focusing on include reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, generative modeling, Bayesian inference, hierarchical learning, and robust evaluation. This role follows a hybrid work schedule and you will report to a Research Director of AI Foundations. You will: - Work on distillation from large foundation models to smaller real-time models. - Explore LLM/VLM distillation recipes to maximally transfer the quality gains from teachers. - Customize distillation data and

Read the full description at careers.withwaymo.com. FewerJobs shows a preview and links to the original posting.