Research Scientist, RL for Autonomous Planning & World Modeling

Waymo; Mountain View (CA); Hybrid; USD 204,000 - 259,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental & Vision insurance

401(k) match

Job summary

Waymo is seeking a highly qualified researcher to join the AI Foundations team in a hybrid role reporting to a Principal Scientist. You will contribute to post-training evaluation of Waymo's World Model and advance RL and distillation techniques for autonomous vehicle trajectory planning.

The role emphasizes scalable training, distributed inference, and collaboration with engineering and research teams across Waymo to share methods and accelerate progress toward safe, reliable autonomous driving.

Qualifications

• PhD or MS in CS/ML/Robotics with RL or foundation models focus.
• Strong publications or open-source contributions.
• Experience building scalable RL infrastructure and distributed training pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Participate in Waymo’s Foundation World Model post-training and evaluation.
• Research and develop cutting-edge RL and Distillation techniques for Autonomous Vehicle Trajectory Planning.
• Integrate emerging research into Waymo’s RL infrastructure and perform rigorous ablations.

Skills

Reinforcement Learning

Foundation Models

Distributed Training

Publications & Open-Source

Model Training Pipelines

Education

PhD or Masters in CS/ML/Robotics

Tools

Data parallel

FSDP sharding

Tensor-parallel

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.

In this hybrid role, you will report to a Principal Scientist.

You Will

• Participate in Waymo’s Foundation World Model post-training and evaluation
• Research and develop cutting edge RL and Distillation techniques for Autonomous Vehicle Trajectory Planning
• Integrate emerging research from the broader AI community into Waymo’s internal RL infrastructure, conducting rigorous ablations to identify and scale the most promising methods
• Partner with engineering and research teams across Waymo to share recipes, techniques, and post-training best practices to accelerate our collective know-how

You Have

• PhD or Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a similar technical field; with 3+ years of industry or post-doc research experience in Reinforcement Learning or Foundation Models
• Demonstration of original contributions to the field through high-impact publications (ArXiv, peer-reviewed conferences like NeurIPS/ICLR/CVPR), technical blog posts, or significant open-source contributions
• Proficiency in implementing model training flows in a scalable, distributed and performant manner such as Data parallel, FSDP and other sharding approaches
• A willingness to work with complexity of globally distributed inference infrastructure

We Prefer

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or Robotics, with a research focus on Reinforcement Learning, Foundation Models, or Multi-Modal learning
• Extensive experience designing and deploying Reinforcement Learning infrastructure, specifically for on-policy learning or alignment with human preferences
• A consistent history of original contributions to the AI community, evidenced by first-author publications at top-tier venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICRA) or maintaining significant open-source ML projects
• Experience with large scale (many-machine) training infrastructure and techniques for inference with large models such as model sharding/tensor-parallel

Benefits

In accordance with Washington state law, we are highlighting our comprehensive benefits package, which is available to all eligible US based employees. Benefits for this role include:

• Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance
• Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match
• Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment
• Sick Time: 40 hours/year (statutory, where applicable); 5 days/event (discretionary)
• Maternity Leave (Short-Term Disability + Baby Bonding): 28-30 weeks
• Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks
• Holidays: 13 paid days per year

Please note that Waymo may not be able to employ remotely in all locations. Please speak with your recruiter about your preferred location for remote work when you begin the interview process.

Salary Range

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is listed below. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the role location or, if the role can be performed remote, the specific salary range for your preferred location, during the hiring process.

$204,000—$259,000 USD