2027 Summer Intern, MS/PhD, Software Engineer, Simulation Evaluation ML Model

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. It 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.

About the role

This internship is for graduate students (PhD or Master’s) who are curious and passionate about Level 4 autonomous driving. Interns partner with leaders on projects that create impact, applying knowledge while expanding their skill‑set. Interns are an important part of Waymo’s culture and recruiting pipeline, working on a fun and rewarding experience.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement an automated semantic extraction pipeline that parses large‑scale simulation logs, vehicle trajectory data, and multi‑agent behavioral events into structured graph representations (entities, temporal relationships, and causal interactions).
• Develop temporal graph modeling techniques to capture time‑varying multi‑agent interactions, road context, and safety‑critical driving events.
• Build a multi‑modal hybrid retrieval engine (combining dense vector embeddings, keyword search, and graph traversal) to enable fast scenario discovery and serve as structured memory for automated failure‑analysis agents.
• Create interactive data exploration tools and visualization dashboards (e.g., Jupyter/Colab‑based explorers) to help autonomy engineers and researchers analyze complex scenario distribution.
• Benchmark retrieval precision, recall, and query latency against traditional tabular and relational search baselines.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with simulation researchers, machine learning engineers, and software infrastructure teams to document system architecture and establish roadmap recommendations.

Requirements

• Currently enrolled in a graduate program (PhD or Master’s) in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related quantitative field, with at least one academic term remaining.
• Strong software development experience in Python and/or C++ in a Linux development environment.
• Solid foundation in core computer science concepts, data structures, algorithm complexity, and distributed data systems.
• Hands‑on experience with modern deep learning frameworks (such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow).

Preferred qualifications

• Demonstrated research background or practical experience in Knowledge Graphs, Graph Algorithms, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), or Information Retrieval / Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG).
• Authorship of published papers in top‑tier AI/ML, data mining, or computer vision conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, The Web Conference [WWW], CVPR, CoRL, SIGMOD, VLDB, ACL).
• Experience with large‑scale distributed data processing systems (e.g., Apache Spark, Apache Beam, distributed SQL query engines, or columnar data lakes).
• Familiarity with temporal graphs, bi‑temporal data modeling, or graph databases/tooling.
• Demonstrated interest or domain experience in autonomous vehicle simulation, behavior prediction, motion planning, trajectory forecasting, or multi‑agent interaction modeling.

Benefits

• Opportunity to solve challenging problems with direct impact on the company.
• Competitive compensation packages with a housing/relocation bonus (if applicable).
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Fun intern events and networking opportunities.
• Onsite perks: free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks; free access to Google shuttles; onsite gym.

Pay

• Masters interns: $70 USD per hour.
• PhD interns: $85 USD per hour.

Schedule

This is a hybrid onsite internship position.