2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, Post Training

Waymo LLC; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 97,000 - 138,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits program

Hybrid onsite internship

Job summary

Waymo LLC in San Francisco is seeking a PhD candidate for a hybrid onsite internship in AI foundations, focusing on reinforcement learning, large foundation models, and robust evaluation.

You will define research goals, set up datasets and training code, document progress, and adapt experiments based on team feedback. Ideal candidates have hands-on model training, familiarity with PyTorch/JAX, and strong analytical skills, with ability to write clean, reliable code.

Qualifications

• Pursuing a PhD in CS, Robotics, ML or related field.
• Knowledge of pre-training and post-training of large foundation models.
• Hands-on experience training modern AI models.
• Strong analytical skills and ability to interpret experimental results.

Responsibilities

• Define research goals, setup dataset and training code to hill-climb model performance, analyze results and define next experiments.
• Write a clear document communicating with team members.
• Incorporate team feedback to adjust setup, experiments and research directions.

Skills

Foundation models

AI model training

Analytical skills

Clean code

Education

PhD candidate in Computer Science, Robotics, or Machine Learning

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.

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