About the job
Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. 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 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.
Responsibilities
Research & Develop state-of-the-art Multimodal LLMs and World models to perform 3D Perception using sensor information from Camera, LiDAR and Radar.
Integrate emerging research from the broader AI community into Waymo’s Encoders and Sensor understanding models
Develop and maintain scalable data pipelines for Training & Eval to process data from multiple sources.
Design and implement evaluation frameworks for perception models.
Study and analyze different behaviors of this model, such as scaling efficacy, downstream quality implications, model architecture design ablations, etc.
Design and implement Perception Modeling solutions to understand LiDAR/Camera/Radar information from autonomous vehicle sensors.
Conducting cutting-edge research and potentially communicating research findings to the wider academic community via technical reports and/or publications.
Qualifications
Minimum
PhD or Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a similar technical field, with 2+ 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
Substantial involvement in and contributions to high impact industry AI projects.
Experience in generative models for domains such as world models, images, videos, 3D, using techniques such as diffusion or autoregressive models.