Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Predictive Planner, Systems Arch
Waymo
Listing collected from Waymo's career site. NextChapter is independent of Waymo.
Mountain View, CA · $213k–$263k a year · Posted September 10, 2026
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Where Mountain View, CA ranks
Where Mountain View, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Best cities for AI-skill jobs45% · of 100
- #1Best cities for AI-skill jobs in the West Coast45% · of 71
- #1Best cities for mid-career professionals in the West Coast68% · of 71
- #1Best all-round cities for mid-career professionals in the West Coast85 / 100 · of 39
- #1Best all-round cities for AI careers in the West Coast96 / 100 · of 39
- #2Best cities for finance pay after cost of living$161k · of 35
Rankings about data & analytics jobs
- Best cities for data and analytics jobs #1 New York (1,713 openings)
- Best cities for data and analytics pay after cost of living #1 Foster ($232k)
- Most requested AI skills in data and analytics jobs #1 Machine learning engineering (17.1%)
- AI tools named most often in data and analytics jobs #1 Databricks (7.6%)
- Employers with the most data and analytics jobs #1 Amazon (711 roles)
Data & Analytics jobs · Top Data & Analytics employers · All rankings
Pay compared with the market
This listing pays about $238,000 a year. Across 110 open senior machine learning engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $200,000 to $238,000 and the median is $209,000. That is inside the middle half of those listings, 14% above the median.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
Senior Machine Learning Engineer salaries by state · Check your own pay
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among computer occupations, all other, AI is already used for a large share of the tasks. Measured exposure for computer occupations, all other: 31% (high).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Skills this job asks for
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About the 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.
The Predictive Planning team (PrePlan) develops and deploys state-of-the-art machine learning solutions that predict the future state of the world and plan the Waymo Driver’s behavior. Our mission is to transform Waymo's unprecedented scale of driving data into robust, generalizable, and performant deep neural networks. These models enable the autonomous vehicle to navigate complex environments safely and efficiently.
The system architecture team handles the onboard contract of the model with the system, including kinematics, interfaces and representations. Our team’s mission is to work across the stack, building the best setup for the model to drive. We tackle this through projects in data, modeling, metrics, and the overall planner system.
In this role, you will report to a Technical Lead Manager.
You will:
Tackle challenging real-world problems with ML and engineering solutions.
Use state of the art techniques to design and build ML models, deploy them in the real world on production vehicles
Design and build the necessary architectures, algorithms, pipelines and evaluation systems on Google's extensive data infrastructure
Collaborate with researchers, product area owners and engineers to develop safe, smooth planning behavior for all road users & deliver product requirements.
You have:
Bachelors in Computer Science, ML, Robotics, similar technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience
Hands-on experience with modern deep learning libraries (eg: TensorFlow, JAX, Pytorch)
Proficient programming skills (eg: Python, C/C++)
Strong analytical and problem solving skills
4+ years of experience in Machine Learning modeling and/or Autonomous Vehicles systems
We prefer:
MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field
Publications in top-tier conferences such as ICML, NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, IROS, CoRL, ACL, or EMNLP
Prior software development or ML research industry experience (including internships)
General software engineering experience solving motion planning or related robotics problems
Experience applying or evaluating ML-based systems in production environments
Experience with performance optimization of deep models, including with respect to specific hardware architectures
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