Technical Lead Manager, Perception, Traffic Control Understanding

Waymo is solving one of the most complex challenges in autonomous driving: understanding the dynamic, unspoken rules of the road. The Scene Understanding team is at the forefront of this mission, tasked with generating real-time, scene-level semantic representations of the world - moving beyond individual bounding boxes to understand construction zones, temporary traffic controls, and complex road graphs.

As a TLM for Scene Understanding, you will act as a true "player-coach" for a team of roughly 6-10 engineers. This is a high impact role, where your models will directly dictate how the Waymo Driver reacts to complex, unstructured environments like active construction zones and temporary traffic signs. This work is critical to Waymo's ability to scale into new cities, across the US and internationally.

In this hybrid role you will report to a Sr Staff Technical Lead Manager.

You will:

• Own a specific domain within scene understanding, such as traffic controls or construction zones, and work with product and safety partners on short- and long-term improvements in support of Waymo's scaling goals
• Lead the analysis of real-world scene understanding issues to develop technical roadmaps and drive the roadmap execution,
• Build resilient and high performing teams through people development and hiring,
• Make project staffing decisions, technical decisions, drive escalations; ultimately accountable for delivering projects.

You have:

• Bachelors in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or an equivalent amount of deep learning experience
• 7+ years of experience building and deploying deep learning/computer vision models in production environments, ideally within the AV or robotics space
• 2-3+ years of experience directly managing and scaling engineering/research teams (managing 5+ reports)
• Fluency in Python, C++, and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, JAX)

We prefer:

• MS or PhD Degree in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science or a similar discipline
• Publications at top-tier conferences like CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS,.
• Experience with C++
• Experience with real-time system design