About the job
Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. The Waymo AI Foundations team develops machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving. 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.
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
Minimum
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
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