2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Vehicle Intent and Prediction

Socket.dev; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 97,000 - 138,000; Full time

Job summary

Waymo in California is seeking a PhD student for an internship focused on machine learning for autonomous driving. You will train and evaluate models, leverage existing data, and help design signals for data quality.

This paid internship offers opportunities to work with cutting-edge robotics, perception, and deep learning teams; on-site in Mountain View with competitive benefits for interns.

Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in a PhD program.
• Experience with ML coding in Python (JAX or PyTorch).
• Strong foundation in statistics and mathematics.
• Familiarity with neural networks.

Responsibilities

• Train & evaluate Loss of Control model to evaluate quality impact of your changes.
• Leverage existing learned models to derive signal on data quality.
• Design & implement measures of effectiveness of said signals.
• Develop or augment data pipelines to annotate synthetic training data with said signals.

Skills

Python (ML)

Statistics

Neural networks

JAX/PyTorch

Education

PhD candidate

Tools

C++

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.

Software Engineering builds the brains of Waymo's fully autonomous driving technology. Our software allows the Waymo Driver to perceive the world around it, make the right decision for every situation, and deliver people safely to their destinations. We think deeply and solve complex technical challenges in areas like robotics, perception, decision-making and deep learning, while collaborating with hardware and systems engineers. If you’re a software engineer or researcher who’s curious and passionate about Level 4 autonomous driving, we'd like to meet you.

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:

• Train & evaluate Loss of Control model to evaluate quality impact of your changes.
• Leverage existing learned models to derive signal on data quality.
• Design & implement measures of effectiveness of said signals.
• Develop or augment data pipelines to annotate synthetic training data with said signals.

You have:

• Currently enrolled in a PhD program.
• ML coding in Python (e.g JAX or Pytorch).
• Strong knowledge of foundational statistics & math.
• Familiarity with neural networks.

We prefer:

• Familiarity with C++, especially in the context of data processing pipelines.
• Prior experience with robotics or prediction problems.

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