Technical Program Manager, Foundation Model Engagements

Waymo's Technical Program Managers are accountable for Waymo's roadmap execution by providing thoughtful cross-functional planning, clarity, and proactive risk management. In the face of complex technical and operational challenges with no established playbooks to follow, we act with thoughtful urgency, driving conversations, discussions, and outcomes. Our team partners closely with every function of Waymo to structure, own and drive work towards real-world deployments of the Waymo Driver across platforms and geographies.

This role follows a hybrid work schedule and you will report to a Director of Program Management.

The Waymo Foundation Model (WaymoFM) program is at the heart of Waymo's long term plan. We build large-scale "teacher" models that improve our onboard and offboard systems. We are seeking a Technical Program Manager for FM Engagements to own the critical link between our Foundation Model efforts and our core product teams: Onboard and Simulation. This role is pivotal in ensuring that the groundbreaking advancements from our teacher models translate into tangible improvements in the Waymo Driver. You will be responsible for the end-to-end management of these engagements - from planning and requirements definition to execution and impact reporting - ensuring seamless collaboration and delivery in line with our product goals and our collaboration tenets.

You will:

• Collaborate with teams to establish clear, actionable roadmaps, requirements, and success metrics for all foundation model engagements.
• Drive translation of high-level product needs into specific teacher model deliverables, distillation targets, and evaluation plans for onboard releases.
• Proactively identify cross-team dependencies, manage technical risks, and align schedules to ensure the smooth integration of teacher models with their student counterparts.
• Drive the day-to-day execution of multiple parallel engagements, ensuring models are delivered on schedule and meet the agreed-upon quality and performance bars.
• Facilitate communication and serve as the primary point of contact between teams, resolving blockers and navigating technical challenges.
• Manage the end-to-end model delivery process, from teacher model hand-off and distillation to student model integration and validation for product releases.
• Lead retrospectives and post-mortems to capture learnings and continuously refine the engagement model between research and production.

You have:

• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
• 5+ years of experience as a Technical Program Manager in a software engineering environment
• A proven track record of successfully managing complex technical projects involving machine learning and/or AI
• Experience with work on applied AI/ML and/or research-to-production technology transfer
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, and presentation skills, effectively conveying technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and technical judgment skills

We prefer:

• Experience with machine learning models, training pipelines, or evaluation frameworks
• Experience with large language models (LLMs), vision language models, generative AI (diffusion models), large-scale model training, optimization, and scaling techniques
• Experience with cloud-based machine learning platforms and infrastructure
• Strong background in 3D computer vision, sensor fusion (camera, lidar), spatial reasoning, and 3D reconstruction methods (NeRF, Gaussian Splatting)
• Experience with simulation environments for autonomous systems, model validation strategies, and methods to ensure model reliability
• Experience with model evaluation techniques, metrics, time-series analysis, and predictive modeling using sensor data
• Master's degree or PhD in a related field