Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Behavior Planning & Prediction

🚗 About Woven by Toyota 🚗

Woven by Toyota is at the forefront of Toyota's ambitious transformation into a mobility company. Inspired by a legacy of innovation for the benefit of others, our mission is to redefine mobility through human-centric innovation, expanding its meaning and societal impact.

Our work is structured around four key pillars:

• AD/ADAS: Autonomous driving and advanced driver-assist technologies.
• Arene: Our software development platform for software-defined vehicles.
• Woven City: A dedicated test course for mobility innovations.
• Cloud & AI: The digital infrastructure powering our collaborative foundation.

Business-critical functions empower these teams to execute their vision. Together, we are united by a bold goal: a world with zero accidents and enhanced well-being for all.

✨ The Behavior Team ✨

The Behavior team at Woven by Toyota is dedicated to tackling the complex challenges of autonomy, focusing on prediction and trajectory planning. Our work involves a diverse range of technical hurdles, including:

• Analyzing vast amounts of multimodal driving data.
• Solving intricate optimization problems.
• Minimizing latency on hardware accelerators.
• Deploying scalable and efficient machine learning (ML) training and evaluation pipelines.
• Designing novel neural network architectures to advance the state-of-the-art in ML for prediction and motion planning.

We are actively seeking driven and creative problem-solvers to join us in improving mobility for everyone through human-centered automated driving solutions for both personal and commercial applications.

🎯 Who Are We Looking For? 🎯

The Behavior team is searching for a skilled Machine Learning Engineer to support the entire lifecycle of machine learning models. This role is crucial for developing and optimizing ML systems, encompassing performance tuning, model development, and building the infrastructure and support systems that facilitate this work.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Developing data pipelines, with a strong emphasis on transform libraries and dataset management.
• Contributing to metrics and metrics pipelines.
• Integrating models into our on-vehicle software.

This is a unique opportunity to design and implement innovative machine learning models for our next-generation autonomous vehicle platform, which will ultimately impact millions of Toyota production vehicles. We are eager to connect with individuals who are passionate about self-driving car technology and its transformative potential for humanity.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design and develop advanced machine learning models in the behavior space, specifically tailored for autonomous vehicles, utilizing deep learning and large-scale data analysis.
• Deploy scalable and efficient ML models on our autonomous vehicle platform.
• Integrate modern technologies with rigorous safety standards while maintaining cost efficiency.
• Oversee the development of new ML models end-to-end, from data strategy and initial development to optimization, production platform validation, and fine-tuning based on metrics and on-road performance.
• Design, build, and maintain ML pipelines that produce training and evaluation data for behavior and prediction models, including ETL, feature extraction, augmentation, and labeling workflows.
• Implement auxiliary pipelines for model validation, metric computation, and on-road performance integration.
• Lead large, multi-person projects and significantly influence the overall motion planning architecture and technical direction.
• Enable and support other engineers by coaching, leading by example, and providing high-quality code and design document reviews, as well as delivering rigorous reports from ML experiments.
• Contribute significantly to the development of essential components for end-to-end ML training and deployment, from data strategy to optimization and validation.
• Be a champion of the scientific method and critical thinking to invent state-of-the-art deep learning solutions.
• Work in a high-velocity environment and employ agile development practices.
• Collaborate closely with teams such as Perception, Simulation, Infrastructure, and Tooling to drive unified solutions.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• MS or PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Robotics, or related quantitative fields, or equivalent industry experience.
• 3+ years of experience with Python, major deep learning frameworks, and software engineering best practices.
• Expertise with deep learning approaches, such as supervised/unsupervised learning, transfer learning, multi-task learning, and deep reinforcement learning.
• Built robust data pipelines, ETL workflows, and integration systems to support behavior prediction models.
• Good understanding of learning-based planning approaches, including imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and state-of-the-art techniques for sequential modeling, such as Transformer architectures.
• Practical experience with ML training and evaluation workflows, including data sampling, preprocessing, and reproducible experiment management.
• 3+ years of experience covering machine learning workflows, data sampling and curation, preprocessing, model training, ablation studies, evaluation, deployment, and inference optimization.
• Comfortable writing C++ code for integration with our autonomous vehicle platform.
• Passion for self-driving car technology and its potential to impact humanity.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to articulate concepts clearly and precisely.

NICE TO HAVES

• Published research at top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, RSS, IROS, ICRA, etc.).
• Proven track record of deploying ML models at scale in self-driving or related fields.
• Familiarity with production-level coding in time-limited task schedules.
• Experience with robot motion planning (e.g., trajectory optimization, sampling-based planning, model predictive control).
• Experience working with temporal data and sequential modeling.
• Expertise in self-driving challenges (Perception, Prediction, Planning, Simulation).

For positions based in Palo Alto, CA, the base pay ranges from $161,000 -$264,500 a year.

Your base salary is one part of your total compensation. We offer a base salary, short-term and long-term incentives, and a comprehensive benefits package. The total compensation offered to an employee will be dependent upon the individual's skills, experience, qualifications, location, and level.

🎁 WHAT WE OFFER 🎁

We are committed to creating a modern work environment that supports our employees and their loved ones. We offer many options of the best programs to allow you to do your most meaningful work and to help you shape the future of mobility.

• Excellent health, wellness, dental and vision coverage
• A rewarding 401k program
• Flexible vacation policy
• Family planning and care benefits

🤝 Our Commitment 🤝

• We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity.
• Any information we receive from you will be used only in the hiring and onboarding process. Please see our privacy notice for more details.