Waymo

<div><p>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.</p></div><p>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.</p>
<p>Waymo interns partner with leaders in the industry on projects that create impact to the company. We believe learning is a two-way street: applying your knowledge while providing you with opportunities to expand your skill-set. Interns are an important part of our culture and our recruiting pipeline. Join us at Waymo for a fun and rewarding internship!</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>You will:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>ML experiment design</li>
<li>ML modeling and iteration</li>
<li>Evaluation and interpretation of results</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>You have:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative field</li>
<li>Familiarity with modern ML techniques (transformers, diffusion models etc) </li>
<li>Familiarity with at least one ML framework (pytorch, tensorflow etc)</li>
<li>Proficiency in Python</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>We prefer:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Evidence of research output (eg: top tier publications)</li>
<li>Exposure to robotics, perception or AV technology</li>
<li>Familiarity with world modeling</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>Note: This will be a hybrid onsite internship position. We will accept resumes on a rolling basis until the role is filled. To be in consideration for multiple roles, you will need to apply to each one individually - please apply to the top 3 roles you are interested in.</p><div><div><div><div>The expected hourly rate for this full-time position is listed below. Interns are also eligible to participate in the Company’s generous benefits programs, subject to eligibility requirements.</div></div><div>Hourly PhD Pay</div><div><span>$85</span><span>—</span><span>$85 USD</span></div></div></div>

2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, Perception Foundation Models

<div><p>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.</p></div><p>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.</p>
<p>Waymo interns partner with leaders in the industry on projects that create impact to the company. We believe learning is a two-way street: applying your knowledge while providing you with opportunities to expand your skill-set. Interns are an important part of our culture and our recruiting pipeline. Join us at Waymo for a fun and rewarding internship!</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>You will:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Design and implement scenario preprocessors (e.g., visual rendering, scene representations, and multimodal prompting) to effectively present driving scenarios to state-of-the-art VLMs</li>
<li>Develop postprocessors that translate VLM outputs into feasible, safe trajectories for closed-loop vehicle control</li>
<li>Evaluate VLM driving harnesses in closed-loop autonomous driving simulation and iterate on representations based on driving metrics</li>
<li>Communicate to both technical and non-technical audiences regarding research motivations and research findings</li>
<li>Conduct cutting-edge research and potentially communicate research findings to the wider academic community via technical reports and/or publications</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>You have:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Currently enrolled in a PhD program in computer science, statistics, applied mathematics, physics, or a related technical field of study</li>
<li>Familiarity with major ML Frameworks (JAX, Pytorch)</li>
<li>Experience using coding agents for auto-research</li>
<li>3+ years of experience with Deep Learning, Computer Vision, and Generative Models (such as VLMs/LLMs)</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>We prefer:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Publications at top-tier conferences such as CVPR/ICCV/ECCV/ICLR/ICML/NeurIPS/IROS/CoRL etc.</li>
<li>Substantial involvement in and contributions to high impact industry AI projects</li>
<li>Experience with Vision-Language Models (VLMs), multimodal prompting/reasoning, or autonomous driving simulation and planning</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>Note: This will be a hybrid onsite internship position. We will accept resumes on a rolling basis until the role is filled. To be in consideration for multiple roles, you will need to apply to each one individually - please apply to the top 3 roles you are interested in.</p><div><div><div><div>The expected hourly rate for this full-time position is listed below. Interns are also eligible to participate in the Company’s generous benefits programs, subject to eligibility requirements.</div></div><div>Hourly PhD Pay</div><div><span>$85</span><span>—</span><span>$85 USD</span></div></div></div>

2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, VLM Harnesses for AV Planning

<div><p>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.</p></div><p>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.</p>
<p>Waymo interns partner with leaders in the industry on projects that create impact to the company. We believe learning is a two-way street: applying your knowledge while providing you with opportunities to expand your skill-set. Interns are an important part of our culture and our recruiting pipeline. Join us at Waymo for a fun and rewarding internship!</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>You will:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Research and develop novel visual and spatio-temporal reasoning methods for multimodal Perception Foundation Models using AV sensor data</li>
<li>Design and implement post-training recipes—including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL)—to improve perception generalization in long-tail autonomous driving scenarios</li>
<li>Conduct large-scale experiments and ablation studies on autonomous driving benchmarks, with the opportunity to publish findings at top-tier AI/CV conferences (e.g., CVPR/ICCV/ECCV/NeurIPS/ICLR/ICML)</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>You have:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Electrical Engineering or a related technical field</li>
<li>Hands-on experience &amp; strong publications in perception, and/or LLM/VLM</li>
<li>Knowledge of pre-training and post-training of the large foundation models</li>
<li>Strong Python coding skills with expertise in modern deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow)</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>We prefer:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Experience with visual reasoning for LLM/VLM/robotics/driving</li>
<li>Experience with RL training in LLM/VLM/robotics</li>
<li>Experience with open-vocabulary perception</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>Note: This will be a hybrid onsite internship position. We will accept resumes on a rolling basis until the role is filled. To be in consideration for multiple roles, you will need to apply to each one individually - please apply to the top 3 roles you are interested in.</p><div><div><div><div>The expected hourly rate for this full-time position is listed below. Interns are also eligible to participate in the Company’s generous benefits programs, subject to eligibility requirements.</div></div><div>Hourly PhD Pay</div><div><span>$85</span><span>—</span><span>$85 USD</span></div></div></div>

2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research Scientist, Visual Reasoning

<div><p>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.</p></div><p>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.</p>
<p>Waymo interns partner with leaders in the industry on projects that create impact to the company. We believe learning is a two-way street: applying your knowledge while providing you with opportunities to expand your skill-set. Interns are an important part of our culture and our recruiting pipeline. Join us at Waymo for a fun and rewarding internship!</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>You will:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Build tools for sampling, selecting, and discarding synthetic driving data with testable hypotheses of how that data will lead to improvement</li>
<li>Train and evaluate models with mixtures of synthetic and logged data</li>
<li>Present and write about methods for synthetic data generation and training</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>You have:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Electrical Engineering or a related technical field</li>
<li>Familiarity with methods of sampling from large models</li>
<li>Experience with post-training methods such as SFT, RL, and preferences</li>
<li>Modern deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and Jax</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>We prefer:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Experience working with open and closed loop decision making models in robotics</li>
<li>Experience with synthetic data generation and evaluation</li>
<li>Prior projects using LLM-as-a-judge</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>Note: This will be a hybrid onsite internship position. We will accept resumes on a rolling basis until the role is filled. To be in consideration for multiple roles, you will need to apply to each one individually - please apply to the top 3 roles you are interested in.</p><div><div><div><div>The expected hourly rate for this full-time position is listed below. Interns are also eligible to participate in the Company’s generous benefits programs, subject to eligibility requirements.</div></div><div>Hourly PhD Pay</div><div><span>$85</span><span>—</span><span>$85 USD</span></div></div></div>

2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, Behavior Post-training

<div><p>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.</p></div><p>Software Engineering builds the brains of Waymo's fully autonomous driving technology. Our software allows the Waymo Driver to perceive the world around it, make the right decision for every situation, and deliver people safely to their destinations. We think deeply and solve complex technical challenges in areas like robotics, perception, decision-making and deep learning, while collaborating with hardware and systems engineers. If you’re a software engineer or researcher who’s curious and passionate about Level 4 autonomous driving, we'd like to meet you. </p>
<p>Waymo interns partner with leaders in the industry on projects that create impact to the company. We believe learning is a two-way street: applying your knowledge while providing you with opportunities to expand your skill-set. Interns are an important part of our culture and our recruiting pipeline. Join us at Waymo for a fun and rewarding internship!</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>You will:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Design, implement, and scale Reinforcement Learning post-training and distillation algorithms (such as flow or diffusion policy optimization, off-policy importance sampling, and constrained multi-objective RL) for foundation world models in simulation and autonomous driving</li>
<li>Develop learned reward models, realism critics, and discriminators within a closed-loop multi-agent simulator to align simulated agent and driving behaviors with human driving realism and safety</li>
<li>Run rigorous closed-loop ablation studies on large-scale TPU clusters—leveraging agentic auto-research workflows and fleet-scale driving behavior metrics (such as route progress, braking comfort, lateral stability, and lane selection)—to mitigate simulator exploitation and distribution shift</li>
<li>Write clean, modular, and well-tested JAX code in core simulation and autonomous driving codebases, collaborating closely with researchers and engineers across simulation, world modeling, and autonomous driving teams</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>You have:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related technical field, with an anticipated graduation date between December 2027 and August 2028 (returning to a degree program for at least one academic term after the internship)</li>
<li>Core Implementation Fluency (Mandatory): Strong tensor implementation and debugging skills in Python and JAX/Flax or PyTorch, with hands-on experience training and modifying modern neural architectures (such as Transformers, Diffusion/Flow models, or deep RL networks)</li>
<li>Deep Research Expertise in Either (a) Reinforcement Learning &amp; Post-Training (hands-on research experience in policy gradient methods such as PPO/GRPO/REINFORCE, off-policy or offline RL such as importance sampling/AWR/DPO, constrained MDPs, inverse RL, or learned reward and critic modeling) OR (b) Generative World, Sequence, or Trajectory Modeling (hands-on research experience in continuous flow matching / Rectified Flows, score-based diffusion policies such as DDPO/DPPO/Diffuser, or spatiotemporal autoregressive world and trajectory models), with working familiarity in the other</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>We prefer:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>First-author publications at top-tier machine learning or robotics venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, CoRL, RSS, ICRA, or equivalent venues) in RL post-training, flow/diffusion policy optimization, generative world models, or autonomous driving</li>
<li>Experience with multi-agent closed-loop simulation, Sim2Real transfer, or reward-hacking mitigation (e.g., Waymax, WOMD, NuPlan, IsaacGym/MuJoCo, adversarial traffic generation, or discriminator stabilization)</li>
<li>Experience profiling and scaling distributed training workloads on TPUs or multi-node GPUs (such as XLA compilation, vectorized batched rollouts, and memory optimization) and familiarity with C++/Python interfaces</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>Note: This will be a hybrid onsite internship position. We will accept resumes on a rolling basis until the role is filled. To be in consideration for multiple roles, you will need to apply to each one individually - please apply to the top 3 roles you are interested in.</p><div><div><div><div>The expected hourly rate for this full-time position is listed below. Interns are also eligible to participate in the Company’s generous benefits programs, subject to eligibility requirements.</div></div><div>Hourly PhD Pay</div><div><span>$85</span><span>—</span><span>$85 USD</span></div></div></div>

Waymo

Open jobs at Waymo

2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, Perception Foundation Models

2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, VLM Harnesses for AV Planning

2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research Scientist, Visual Reasoning

2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, Behavior Post-training

2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Machine Learning - Simulation & Closed-Loop Training

Working for Waymo?

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