2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research Scientist, Visual Reasoning

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

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits programs eligible

Job summary

Waymo LLC in Mountain View, CA is seeking a PhD candidate to contribute to the Waymo AI Foundations team. You will research and develop novel visual and spatio-temporal reasoning methods for multimodal perception using autonomous-vehicle sensor data.

You will implement post-training recipes—SFT and RL—to improve perception generalization in long-tail driving scenarios, and conduct large-scale experiments with opportunities to publish at top AI conferences.

Qualifications

• PhD candidate in a technical field related to perception, ML, or robotics.
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Responsibilities

• Research and develop novel visual and spatio-temporal reasoning methods for multimodal perception foundation models.
• Design and implement post-training recipes including SFT and RL to improve perception in long-tail driving scenarios.

Skills

Publications in perception

LLM/VLM familiarity

Education

PhD in Computer Science / ML / Robotics

Tools

Python

PyTorch

JAX

TensorFlow

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.

You Will

• Research and develop novel visual and spatio-temporal reasoning methods for multimodal Perception Foundation Models using AV sensor data
• Design and implement post-training recipes—including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL)—to improve perception generalization in long-tail autonomous driving scenarios
• Conduct 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 field
• Hands-on experience & strong publications in perception, and/or LLM/VLM
• Knowledge of pre-training and post-training of the large foundation models
• Strong 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/driving
• Experience with RL training in LLM/VLM/robotics
• Experience with open-vocabulary perception

Note: This will be a hybrid onsite internship position. We will accept resumes on a rolling basis until the role is filled. Interns are also eligible to participate in the Company’s generous benefits programs, subject to eligibility requirements.

Hourly PhD Pay

$85—$85 USD