Technical Lead Manager, Planner

Waymo
Mountain View, California, USA / New York, New York, USA / Mountain View (US-MTV-EMF680), Mountain View, California, United States2025-10-31

About the job

Our team maintains and improves a high impact system that is a critical part of Waymo's Planner. You will work at the intersection of robotics and modern ML, collaborating across our teams, to build solutions that can handle situations from everyday driving to ones that happen once in a million miles.

Responsibilities

Own and improve the onboard ML model for trajectory scoring and ranking.

Management of a team of MLEs focused on model quality improvements

Provide technical leadership to improve planner ML models for both short-term product improvements, as well as long-term experimentation

Investigate driving behavior issues from logs and understand the root cause

Improve performance of the state of the art ML models in Planner

Expand the impact of ML models while preserving interpretability and behavioral guarantees

Provide mentorship for junior engineers on the team

Qualifications

Minimum

Masters or PhD degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning or a similar discipline.

Proficiency in Python or C++

Experience with Machine Learning models in production systems, particularly ranking and scoring systems

Proven leadership experience guiding an ML team in meeting company objectives

Preferred

AV or Robotics experience

8+ years of Software Engineering experience in complex systems