Research Scientist, RL for Autonomous Planning – World Modeling
Waymo
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Hybrid
Location: Mountain View • California • United States
Visit company websiteExplore more
Salary
💰 $204,000 - $259,000 per year
About the role
- 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
Requirements
- 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
Benefits
- Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program
- equity incentive plan
- generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
Reinforcement LearningDistillation techniquesAutonomous Vehicle Trajectory PlanningModel training flowsData parallelFSDPSharding approachesAI research integrationAblation studiesScalable distributed systems
Soft Skills
CollaborationResearch partnershipKnowledge sharingTechnical communicationProblem-solving
Certifications
PhD in Computer ScienceMasters in Computer ScienceMasters in Machine LearningMasters in Robotics