RL Research Scientist: Autonomous Planning & World Modeling

Waymo; New York (NY); On-site; USD 204,000 - 259,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid Time Off 20 days/year

Sick Time 40 hours/year

Maternity Leave 28‑30 weeks

Baby Bonding Leave 18 weeks

Holidays 13 paid days/year

Job summary

Waymo, based in New York, seeks a Principal Scientist for its AI Foundations team. The role focuses on advancing RL and foundation models for autonomous vehicle planning within a hybrid work setup and reporting to a Principal Scientist.

You will collaborate across Waymo's research and engineering groups to push forward scalable, distributed ML systems and robust evaluation for real-world driving scenarios.

Qualifications

• PhD or Masters in CS, ML, or robotics with 3+ years RL or foundation models research.
• Original contributions via high-impact publications, technical blogs, or open-source work.
• Experience implementing scalable distributed training (data parallel, sharding).
• Willingness to work with globally distributed inference infrastructure.
• Preferred RL infrastructure design and deployment with human-alignment focus.

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 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

Skills

Reinforcement Learning

Foundation Models

Distributed training

Publications

Model sharding

Distributed inference

Education

PhD or MSc in CS/ML/Robotics

Job description

Waymo, based in New York, seeks a Principal Scientist for its AI Foundations team. The role focuses on advancing RL and foundation models for autonomous vehicle planning within a hybrid work setup and reporting to a Principal Scientist.

You will collaborate across Waymo's research and engineering groups to push forward scalable, distributed ML systems and robust evaluation for real-world driving scenarios.