About this opportunity
Waymo lists this Research Scientist, RL for Autonomous Planning & World Modeling opportunity in kirkland, Washington. Review the employer’s description below for duties, qualifications and application requirements.
Job description
About Waymo
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 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.
Team Mission
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.
Role Summary
In this hybrid role, you will report to a Principal Scientist.
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
Qualifications
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
Preferred Qualifications
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
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
$204,000 — $259,000 USD
Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.
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Worksite address
kirkland, WA, 98034, US
Who can apply
Review the original listing for work authorization, qualifications and employer requirements.