2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research Scientist, Visual Reasoning

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

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits programs

Job summary

Waymo is seeking a Summer Intern for PhD-level research in visual reasoning and multimodal perception. You will research and develop methods using AV sensor data, and design post-training recipes such as SFT and RL to improve perception in long-tail scenarios.

You will run large-scale experiments and may publish findings at top AI conferences. The role is hybrid onsite at Mountain View, CA, with applications rolling and internship-friendly compensation.

Qualifications

• Pursuing PhD in Computer Science, ML, Robotics, or related field.
• Strong publications in perception and/or LLM/VLM.
• Excellent Python coding skills with PyTorch or similar frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Research and develop visual and spatio-temporal reasoning methods for multimodal perception.
• Design and implement post-training recipes (SFT/RL) to improve perception generalization.
• Run large-scale experiments and ablation studies on AV benchmarks and publish findings at top AI conferences.

Skills

Perception

LLM/VLM

Python

PyTorch

Job description

# 2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research Scientist, Visual ReasoningInternship Live nowMountain View, CAPosted October 19, 2026Last seen at Waymo on October 19, 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:Research and develop novel visual and spatio-temporal reasoning methods for multimodal Perception Foundation Models using AV sensor dataDesign and implement post-training recipes—including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL)—to improve perception generalization in long-tail autonomous driving scenariosConduct large-scale experiments and ablation studies on autonomous driving benchmarks, with the opportunity to publish findings at top-tier AI/CV conferences (e.g., CVPR/ICCV/ECCV/NeurIPS/ICLR/ICML)You have:Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Electrical Engineering or a related technical fieldHands-on experience & strong publications in perception, and/or LLM/VLMKnowledge of pre-training and post-training of the large foundation modelsStrong Python coding skills with expertise in modern deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow)We prefer:Experience with visual reasoning for LLM/VLM/robotics/drivingExperience with RL training in LLM/VLM/roboticsExperience with open-vocabulary perceptionNote: 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 USD