PhD ML Intern - Autonomous Driving Research

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

Job summary

Waymo LLC in Mountain View, CA is seeking a PhD candidate to contribute to the Waymo Driver’s learning and simulation stack during a hybrid onsite internship. You will work on reinforcement learning, world models, and scalable experiments in a collaborative environment with researchers and engineers.

The ideal candidate has deep RL or generative modeling experience, strong Python/JAX/PyTorch skills, and publications.

Qualifications

• Pursuing PhD in CS, ML or robotics with graduation between 2027 and 2028 (returning to a degree).
• Expert in Python with JAX/Flax or PyTorch; hands-on with modern neural architectures.
• Strong research background in RL or generative/world/trajectory modeling with familiarity in the other domain.

Responsibilities

• Design and scale reinforcement learning post-training and diffusion policy optimization in simulation.
• Develop learned reward models and discriminators in a closed-loop multi-agent simulator.
• Run rigorous ablation studies on large TPU clusters to analyze behavior and safety.
• Write clean, modular JAX code and collaborate with researchers across simulation and autonomous driving teams.

Skills

Python

JAX/Flax

PyTorch

Tensor implementation

Education

PhD candidate in Computer Science, ML, Robotics

Tools

JAX/Flax

PyTorch

Transformers

Job description

Waymo LLC in Mountain View, CA is seeking a PhD candidate to contribute to the Waymo Driver’s learning and simulation stack during a hybrid onsite internship. You will work on reinforcement learning, world models, and scalable experiments in a collaborative environment with researchers and engineers.

The ideal candidate has deep RL or generative modeling experience, strong Python/JAX/PyTorch skills, and publications.