Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Vehicle Perception at Woven by Toyota
Palo Alto, CA
$140,000–$230,000from the description
Aug 12, 2026
Palo Alto, CA
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A Senior Machine Learning Engineer role on the Vehicle Perception team at Woven by Toyota, focused on designing and deploying perception foundation models for autonomous vehicles using large-scale multimodal sensor data. The work spans the full ML lifecycle — data strategy, model architecture, training pipelines, and on-vehicle inference optimization — with close collaboration across Perception, Motion Planning, Simulation, and Infrastructure teams. Hybrid in-office presence (3 days/week) is required at one of three locations.
Senior level · 3+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Master's required · Full-time
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How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 15 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (data scientists). range 3–25
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $189,150 (middle half $152,859–$224,286). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 15, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The posting lists three possible office locations: Nihonbashi (Japan), Palo Alto (CA), and Ann Arbor (MI). The CBSA is set to San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara (covering Palo Alto) as the most prominent US tech hub listed; Ann Arbor, MI (CBSA 11460) is a legitimate alternative US location. The Japan location makes this role potentially non-US for some hires, but the compensation is quoted in USD and the posting is clearly US-facing.
Degree requirement is MS or PhD in a relevant field, or 'equivalent industry experience.' Because equivalent experience is explicitly accepted, the degree is treated as preferred rather than a hard gate — however, the phrasing 'MS or PhD... or equivalent' is borderline; it is flagged here for recruiter review.
The '3+ years' experience demands are stated at the role level across Python, deep learning frameworks, and ML workflows — these are captured as skill-level years where a named technology is involved, and as the overall years minimum (3) for the overall role floor.
SOC classification is a genuine toss-up between 15-2051 (Data Scientists — ML modeling, statistics, deep learning research) and 15-1252 (Software Developers — the role also ships production code and deploys models to vehicles). 15-2051 is chosen as primary because the core work is ML research and model development; 15-1252 is the runner-up given the strong software engineering and C++ deployment emphasis.
'Deep learning frameworks' is listed as a required skill with common alternatives (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX) since the JD says 'any major deep learning framework' without naming one specifically.
Published research at top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, CVPR) and hands-on experience with world models/video prediction are listed under 'Nice to Haves' and are marked as preferred accordingly.
Read the full posting
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