ML Research Intern: Transformers & Driving Data

Waymo LLC; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 96,000 - 117,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Housing/relocation bonus (if eligible)

Fun intern events and networking

Onsite amenities

Free breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks

Free Google shuttles

Onsite gym

Job summary

Waymo LLC is seeking a software engineering/ML internship focused on the Waymo Driver's perception and decision systems. You will train and evaluate deep learning models, build data pipelines, and contribute to production-grade code within a high‑traffic codebase.

The role requires ongoing PhD or MS studies in CS/ML, strong C++/Python skills, and experience with modern DL frameworks. This is a hybrid onsite internship with opportunities to learn from cross‑functional teams.

Qualifications

• Hands‑on experience training and evaluating deep learning models in modern frameworks (JAX, PyTorch or TensorFlow) including building data pipelines, choosing losses, and debugging training runs.
• Strong programming skills in C++/Python, plus a solid grounding in ML fundamentals: precision/recall trade‑offs, class imbalance, evaluation metric selection, and rigorous experiment design.

Responsibilities

• Train and fine‑tune a large multi‑task transformer over driving‑log sequences, in JAX/Flax on TPUs - iterating on fine‑tuning strategies, training data mixtures, and losses to improve evaluation quality for the hillclimbing workflow
• Design and run rigorous offline and end‑to‑end evaluations - PR‑AUC, calibration quality, and metric sensitivity on real hillclimbing A/B runs - and build the dataset and evaluation pipelines needed to produce them
• Land production‑quality code in a shared, high‑traffic codebase, and communicate results through a design doc, team deep dives, and a final intern presentation, partnering with UEM Core, Data Science, and release‑eval stakeholders

Skills

C++/Python

JAX/Flax

Deep learning

Data pipelines

TPUs

ML fundamentals

Experiment design

Education

MS/PhD in CS/ML

Tools

SQL

Job description

Waymo LLC is seeking a software engineering/ML internship focused on the Waymo Driver's perception and decision systems. You will train and evaluate deep learning models, build data pipelines, and contribute to production-grade code within a high‑traffic codebase.

The role requires ongoing PhD or MS studies in CS/ML, strong C++/Python skills, and experience with modern DL frameworks. This is a hybrid onsite internship with opportunities to learn from cross‑functional teams.