# Luis Perez > Staff ML Engineer @ Waymo, ex-{DeepMind, Meta, Google} Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/luisperez I work as a software engineer on artificial intelligence, open-source software for machine learning, and large-scale distributed systems for billion parameter models. I'm experienced leading enginering platform teams serving products impacting billions of users at Google , DeepMind, and Meta (formerly Facebook). I'm a domain expert in content understanding, including multimodal methods for image and text embeddings. I have experience with core AI technologes such as seq2seq models, transformers, residual networks, and other advanced techniques in content understanding, embedding generation, and supervised learning. I'm proficient in deep learning, having 3+ years experience in graph attention networks, message passing graph neural networks, and other SOTA deep-learning architectures. I've deployed several models at scale, impacting Google Maps (DeepMind), YouTube WatchNext (Google), IG Reels (Meta), and News Feed (Meta). I also have ample experience in large-scale highly-resilient distributed sytems, query engines, vectorized query engines, columnar data formats, and data pipelines. During my free time, I do AI/ML consulting and enjoy mentoring others. I was a visiting faculty teaching advanced algorithms and machine learning for cybersecurity at North Carolona A&T. I also built frontend sites for fun, dabble in web3, and enjoy learning. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer - Generative AI @ Waymo Jan 2025 – Present | Mountain View, CA Waymo World Model, Foundational World Model, Simulation Realism ### Staff Software Engineer @ Waymo Jan 2022 – Present | Mountain View, California, United States Building AI to understand human behavior so we can drive with Waymo safely. - Focus on Foundational Behavior Models, Foundation World Model -Synthetic Data Generation, Distillation, Inference Techniques for Large Foundational Models Applied Researcher with >5.1k citations in AI. ### Staff Software Engineer @ Meta Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Menlo Park, CA FAIAR: Engineering lead in the PyTorch Ecosystem at Meta. This includes training (PyTorch Lightning) and domain undestanding frameworks and libraries (multimodal, audio, text, vision, etc.). Applied Researcher with >2.3k citations and experience across production training systems. ### Visiting Faculty @ Meta Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 Visiting faculty at North Carolina A&T University, the largest public historically black university in the US with the largest number of black-engineering graduates. I led the course design at the undergraduate/graduate level for advanced algorithms, machine learning, and artifical intelligence units as part of Meta's Engineering in Residence Program. Focused on research at the intersection of content understanding for cybersecurity at the AI/Cybersecurity lab. ### Software Engineer @ Meta Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Menlo Park, California, United States Working on building an industry leading multimodal content understanding platform across Facebook AI, consolidating content understanding and ranking onto a single training stack based on PyTorch to increase research to production velocity. Migrated 100+ models from Caffe2 to PyTorch. Leading efforts to generalize advanced model compression techniques (such as quantized-aware training, post-training quantization, model distillation) across domains and tech stacks to decrease model inference latency in production. Deployed libraries across open-source and internal frameworks such as PyTorch Lightning to improve ML data read performance by 19% (as measured by data load times). ### Senior Research Engineer @ DeepMind Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | Mountain View, California Applied research engineer solving problems across Alphabet/Google (Ads, Sales, Shopping, YouTube, Text-to-Speech, Cloud, Assistant, Play, Infra, Maps, Waymo) using advanced ML techniques from DeepMind Research. Collaborate with partner teams (Geo, YouTube) to bring cutting edge deep learning and reinforcement learning techniques from DeepMind into Google. ### Software Engineer @ Google Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area Work on empowering product teams across Google to build data-powered systems for both production products and adhoc data exploration and analysis. ### Software Engineer @ Okta, Inc. Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | Seattle Collaborated with the Azuqua team to improve beta application monitoring service, KeepWatch. Front-end and back-end development completed using Node.js under the FLUX/React frameworks. Improved notification integration through the use of the Slack Web API. ### Teaching Fellow @ Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Jan 2013 – Jan 2016 | Cambridge, Massachusetts Taught class section of >20 students to program in C, PHP,JavaScript and SQL. Supported >700 students with weekly problem sets, grading. Received multiple teaching awards. Classes taught include: Data Structures and Algorithms, Programming Languages, Systems and Design, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning ### OPT Tutor @ Bureau of Study Council Jan 2013 – Jan 2016 | Cambridge, Massachusetts Tutored students in a in subjects from Pre-Calculus to Multi-variable Calculus. Topics incde: dot products, coordinate sytems, complex derivatives, Stokes' Theorem, proofs. ### Research Associate @ Ventana Financial Inc. Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 Evaluated early investment opportunities in small start-ups as well as mid-sized companies. Worked with investors to discover hidden gems in the local Chicago industry apt for growth. Encouraged and helped manage entrepreneurs in their pursuit of funding by evaluating and analyzing their business. ### Software Engineer @ Google Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Mountain View Make Google's YouTube services fast and reliable for billions of users. Routinely solve software and systems issues ranging from distributed change propagation on live serving systems, to designing and deploying intelligent load balancing systems for the largest user-facing services in the world. I worked with the YouTube Data team to develop technological systems that provide real-time data analysis to content creators. This involved close collaboration with multiple teams as well as in-depth understanding of the underlying distributed systems. I prepared and lead the initial design and iterated through multiple implementations. A final implementation went into testing at the end of August and proved effective, with a successful demo to the team and plans for a continued expansion of the work. Currently working on distributed systems and exploring machine learning applications that can improve the performance and reliability of the system. ### Researcher @ Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | Wyss Institue of Biologically Inspired Engineering Lead exploration of decentralized, collective construction. Explored decentralized algorithms for the construction of complex structures, developed Python physics-based simulation based on SAP2000, interfaced using PyWin32, and shared results to group of peers and professional researchers. ### Researcher @ Harvard University Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Harvard Forest Used R, Apache Ant, Java, and git/svn to develope data provenance collection software for the R Scripting environment, develop extensive system tests with Apache Ant, assist in improving the visualization of data derivation graphs using Java, and setup Git and SVN framework for version control. ### Course Assistant @ Harvard University Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Cambridge, Massachusetts Lead section in linear algebra for > 30 students. Main concepts: kernels, images, transformations, vector spaces, and Fourier analysis. Led section for calculus course. Main concepts: Riemann sums, integration, infinite series, differential equations and dynamical systems. Graded problem sets. ### Ranch Hand @ Alleluia Hills Ranch Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 | Nacogdoches, Texas Managed several acres of ranch land. ## Education ### Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Mathematics and Computer Science Harvard University ### Master's degree in Computer Science Stanford University ### High School Diploma in General Studies Nacogdoches High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nautilik --- Source: https://flows.cv/luisperez JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/luisperez/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-01