2027 Summer Intern, MS/PhD, Perception, Machine Learning

About the role

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. Originating as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has developed the Waymo Driver—the World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve mobility access and reduce traffic‑crash fatalities. The Waymo Driver powers the company’s fully autonomous ride‑hail service and can be applied across various vehicle platforms and product use cases, having logged over ten million rider‑only trips, 100 million miles of real‑world driving, and tens of billions of simulation miles across 15+ U.S. states. The Perception team builds the system that learns spatial‑temporal and semantic representations of the vehicle’s surroundings, collaborating with downstream teams on optimization and integration into the Waymo Driver, conducting research to solve real‑world problems, and partnering with Alphabet research groups. Interns work on‑site at Waymo’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA, in a hybrid onsite arrangement.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement state-of-the-art multi-modality (camera/radar/lidar/audio) and multi-task perception models.
• Work on potential project areas including: 3D object detection and tracking, open‑vocabulary detection applying world knowledge models, 3D occupancy detection, semantic segmentation, large‑scale foundation models, pre‑training and self‑supervised learning through forecasting.
• Train and evaluate ML models on Waymo’s vast and high‑fidelity driving‑log data.
• Gain experience using large‑scale ML infrastructure and working in a team environment.

Requirements

• Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Computer Science, Robotics, or a similar technical field, or enrolled in a master's program with a strong publication record.
• Experience programming in Python.
• Experience building ML models with JAX, PyTorch, or TensorFlow.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong track record of high‑quality machine learning / computer vision research.
• Publications at top‑tier conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, ICRA, IROS, RSS, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCV, PAMI.
• Experience in object detection, segmentation, multiple‑object tracking, audio perception, or occupancy detection.

Benefits

Interns are eligible to participate in the Company’s generous benefits programs, subject to eligibility requirements.

Pay

• Master’s level interns: $70 USD per hour.
• PhD level interns: $85 USD per hour.