2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Machine Learning, Computer Vision

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. Software Engineering builds the brains of Waymo’s fully autonomous driving technology, enabling perception, decision‑making, and deep‑learning capabilities in collaboration with hardware and systems engineers.

About the role

This hybrid onsite internship partners interns with industry leaders on projects that create impact for Waymo. Interns will work on deep multimodal perception foundation models, applying and expanding their skill‑set while contributing to Level 4 autonomous driving research and development.

Responsibilities

• Analyze and characterize internal feature representations of deep multimodal perception foundation models.
• Validate model performance on large‑scale autonomous vehicle sensor datasets and simulation environments.
• Train, fine‑tune, and evaluate deep neural networks to improve model performance.
• Inspect perception foundational models to derive signals on data quality.
• Implement or augment data pipelines to improve data quality.

Requirements

• Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related quantitative field.
• Experience programming in Python.
• Practical experience training, fine‑tuning, and evaluating deep learning models for computer vision or multimodal perception (e.g., using PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow).
• Solid understanding of modern neural architectures (e.g., Vision Transformers, multimodal sensor encoders).
• Research experience or publications in multimodal deep learning models, or vision foundational models (preferred).
• Hands‑on experience working with multi‑camera and/or 3D LiDAR perception systems in robotics or autonomous driving.
• Experience evaluating large‑scale perception systems under practical settings.

Pay

Hourly PhD Pay: $85 USD per hour.