Senior Research Scientist, Foundation Model (LLM/VLM)

Waymo
Mountain View, CA, USA / San Francisco, CA, USA / Mountain View (US-MTV-EMF680), Mountain View, California, United States2026-01-28

About the job

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. The mission of the Waymo Applied Research team is to develop machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving, towards the goal of the 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.

Responsibilities

Conduct applied foundation model research and development

Design compelling experiments by training and evaluating large deep learning models

Present results to peers and leadership

Write high quality code, unit tests, and documentation

Qualifications

Minimum

Masters or PhD in deep learning in behavior and agent modeling or simulation

Proficiency in Python

3+ years of experience with modern deep learning frameworks. Prefer JAX or TensorFlow 2; however, Pytorch is acceptable.

Experience in generative modeling and LLMs or VLMs (e.g., Gemini, Llama, GPT)

Preferred

Experience with:

Post-training, incl. reinforcement learning

Distillation

Transformer models

Autoencoders and embeddings