Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Simulation
Waymo
Listing collected from Waymo's career site. NextChapter is independent of Waymo.
Mountain View, CA · $251k–$310k a year · Posted July 13, 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 $280,500 a year. Across 49 open staff machine learning engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $237,500 to $280,500 and the median is $276,000. That is inside the middle half of those listings, 2% above the median.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
Staff 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 Driver Understanding and Evaluation team at Waymo develops a rich understanding of Waymo Driver's behavior. With over 1 million driverless miles per week, it is critical that Waymo can understand and assess the behavior of all its vehicles - both in the field and in simulation - with automated algorithms. The learned metrics team is a strategic bet to use machine learning to ensure we can scale to meet Waymo's goals. We collaborate across teams to bring ML to production systems and build what is Waymo's reward function. We build and operate large-scale machine learning and data systems, simulation workflows, and insight tools. We combine expert human judgements and advanced machine learning models to deliver training and evaluation data for the Waymo driver. We are looking for researchers and software engineers who are passionate about developing production grade machine learning systems for our autonomous vehicles and have an incessant drive to improve the performance of our technology stack.
In this hybrid role, you will report to an Engineering Manager
You will:
Report into the TLM for the Learned Metrics Team
Develop ML models that assess our autonomous vehicle's behavior.
Develop ML infrastructure to support performant models.
Collaborate across teams to bring state-of-the-art to production.
You have:
BS in Computer Science, Robotics, Statistics, Physics, Math or another quantitative area, or equivalent work experience
5+ years of experience building productionized ML models
Code and design skills: comfort building production systems (Python / C++)
Background in applied Deep Learning
A track record in improving model quality
We prefer:
8+ years of experience building productionized ML models
Experience in reinforcement learning, transfer learning, or learning.
Experience with large scale data and models
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