RL Research Scientist - Autonomous Planning & World Models

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 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.