2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, VLM Harnesses for AV Planning

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

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits programs

Job summary

Waymo LLC seeks a PhD student to advance AI foundations for autonomous driving. You will design preprocessing for driving scenarios, build postprocessing for safe trajectories, and evaluate language-visual models in simulation.

The role emphasizes cross-disciplinary collaboration and potential publication in top venues. Ideal candidates are enrolled in a PhD program, proficient in JAX/PyTorch, and have 3+ years in deep learning, CV, and generative modeling.

Qualifications

• Enrolled in a PhD program in a technical field such as CS, statistics, applied mathematics or physics.
• Familiar with major ML frameworks (JAX, PyTorch).
• Experience using coding agents for auto-research.
• 3+ years of experience with Deep Learning, Computer Vision and Generative Models (e.g. VLMs/LLMs).

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scenario preprocessors for presenting driving scenarios to VLMs.
• Develop postprocessors translating VLM outputs into feasible, safe trajectories for vehicle control.
• Evaluate VLM driving harnesses in closed-loop autonomous driving simulation and iterate on representations.
• Communicate research motivations and findings to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Conduct cutting-edge research and publish technical reports or papers.

Skills

JAX

PyTorch

Auto-research tooling

Deep Learning

Computer Vision

Generative Models

Education

PhD program in CS/Stats/Math/Physics

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:

• Design and implement scenario preprocessors (e.g., visual rendering, scene representations, and multimodal prompting) to effectively present driving scenarios to state‑of‑the‑art VLMs
• Develop postprocessors that translate VLM outputs into feasible, safe trajectories for closed‑loop vehicle control
• Evaluate VLM driving harnesses in closed‑loop autonomous driving simulation and iterate on representations based on driving metrics
• Communicate to both technical and non‑technical audiences regarding research motivations and research findings
• Conduct cutting‑edge research and potentially communicate research findings to the wider academic community via technical reports and/or publications

You have:

• Currently enrolled in a PhD program in computer science, statistics, applied mathematics, physics, or a related technical field of study
• Familiarity with major ML Frameworks (JAX, Pytorch)
• Experience using coding agents for auto‑research
• 3+ years of experience with Deep Learning, Computer Vision, and Generative Models (such as VLMs/LLMs)

We prefer:

• Publications at top‑tier conferences such as CVPR/ICCV/ECCV/ICLR/ICML/NeurIPS/IROS/CoRL etc.
• Substantial involvement in and contributions to high impact industry AI projects
• Experience with Vision‑Language Models (VLMs), multimodal prompting/reasoning, or autonomous driving simulation and planning

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