2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, Post Training

Waymo LLC; Mountain View (CA); Hybrid; USD 97,000 - 138,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous benefits programs

Job summary

Waymo LLC is offering a hybrid onsite internship in Mountain View, CA, focused on AI foundations research for autonomous driving. You will define research goals, set up datasets and training pipelines, and analyze results to steer subsequent experiments.

The ideal candidate is pursuing a PhD in CS/Robotics/ML with hands-on AI training experience. In addition to technical work, you will document findings and adapt your approach based on team feedback, contributing to a collaborative research

Qualifications

• PhD in CS/ML or related field required.
• Strong knowledge of pre-training and post-training of large foundation models.
• Hands-on experience training modern AI models.

Responsibilities

• Define research goals and setup dataset and training code; hill-climb model performance and plan next experiments.
• Communicate results effectively with team through documentation.
• Iterate based on team feedback to adjust experiments and research directions.

Skills

Foundation model pretraining/post-

Hands-on AI training

Data analysis & hypothesis

Bug-free coding

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

The mission of the Waymo AI Foundations team is to develop machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving, towards the goal of safely operating Waymo vehicles in dozens of cities and under all driving conditions. As part of our work, we also initiate and foster collaborations with other research teams in Alphabet. AI Foundations areas that we are currently focusing on include reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, generative modeling, Bayesian inference, hierarchical learning, and robust evaluation.

Waymo interns partner with leaders in the industry on projects that create impact to the company. We believe learning is a two-way street: applying your knowledge while providing you with opportunities to expand your skill-set. Interns are an important part of our culture and our recruiting pipeline. Join us at Waymo for a fun and rewarding internship!

You will:

• Define research goals, setup dataset and training code to hill-climb the model performance, analyze the results and define the next sets of experiments
• Write a good document for communicating with team members
• Able to use the feedback from the team members to adjust the setup, experiments, and research directions

You have:

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative field
• Knowledge of pre-training and post-training of the large foundation models
• Hands-on experience of training modern AI models
• Good analytical skills and interpret experiments results and forming verifiable hypothesis
• Write a bug-free code, and able to implement correct software without much guidance

We prefer:

• Have a solid research background in robotics or self-driving cars
• Familiar with modern AI infrastructure and tooling such as pytorch, jax, and comfortable in working on cluster/server environments
• Have a strong research skill and publish several papers in top conferences

Note: This will be a hybrid onsite internship position. We will accept resumes on a rolling basis until the role is filled.

The expected hourly rate for this full-time position is listed below. Interns are also eligible to participate in the Company’s generous benefits programs, subject to eligibility requirements.

Hourly PhD Pay

$85—$85 USD