2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, RSI for Autonomous Driving

First Roles; Mountain View (CA); Hybrid; USD 97,000 - 138,000; Full time

Job summary

Waymo is seeking a PhD candidate intern in Mountain View to advance RSI and autonomous driving foundational models. You will conduct literature research, design data/post-training schemes and implement RSI components in a close-loop with world models.

Ideal candidates have deep RL knowledge, transformer familiarity, and experience with AI model training, testing, and ablations. This is a hybrid onsite internship with hourly pay for PhD students.

Qualifications

• Pursuing a PhD in a quantitative field (CS/Robotics/ML).
• Strong foundation in reinforcement learning and AI models.
• Experience with AI model post-training and evaluation.
• Familiarity with transformer-based architectures and tuning.

Responsibilities

• Conduct literature research on RSI, physics AI foundational models and RL for autonomous driving.
• Design data and post-training recipe to RL the driver with world models in a closed loop.
• Code and implement the RSI system and related components.
• Inspect training results and ablation studies to iterate on algorithm design.

Skills

PhD candidate

Reinforcement learning

World models

Python

Transformer architectures

Education

PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, ML

Tools

Rex

Verl

NeMo-RL

Job description

Waymo# 2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, RSI for Autonomous DrivingInternship Live nowMountain View, CAPosted October 22, 2026Last seen at Waymo on October 22, 2026.FirstRoles never charges new grads or interns to apply.## About this roleWaymo 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 DriverTM—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:Literature research of SOTA in RSI, physics AI foundational models, autonomous driving foundational models, World Action models and connect the SOTA to their research projects to improve driver qualityDesign new data and post-training recipe to RL the driver with the critic model and world model in a close loop setupCoding and implementing the RSI systemInspect training results and ablation studies to iterate the algorithm designYou have:Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative fieldDepth in foundational AI model post-training, especially RLFluency in using AI coding agents, fluency in one of the RL training framework such as Rex, Verl, NeMo-RLFluency in AI model training basics such as transformer architecture, hyperparameter tuning, overfitting debugFamiliarity with autonomous driving, physics AI, VLA, or world modelsWe prefer:Depth in RL for robotics or autonomous driving modelsDepth in world action models or video generation modelsExperience in Recursive Self-Improvement training for AI models.Note: This will be a hybrid onsite internship position. We will accept resumes on a rolling basis until the role is filled. To be in consideration for multiple roles, you will need to apply to each one individually - please apply to the top 3 roles you are interested in.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 USDDescription provided by Waymo via its job board.