Research Scientist, RL for Autonomous Planning & World Modeling

Job Summary

The Waymo AI Foundations team is seeking a hybrid role candidate to participate in Waymo’s Foundation World Model post-training and evaluation research. This role will involve developing cutting-edge Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Distillation techniques for Autonomous Vehicle Trajectory Planning, integrating emerging research from the broader AI community into Waymo’s internal RL infrastructure, and partnering with engineering and research teams across Waymo to share best practices.

Responsibilities

• Participate in Waymo’s Foundation World Model post-training and evaluation research
• Develop cutting-edge RL and Distillation techniques for Autonomous Vehicle Trajectory Planning
• Integrate emerging research from the broader AI community into Waymo’s internal RL infrastructure, conducting rigorous ablations to identify and scale the most promising methods
• Partner with engineering and research teams across Waymo to share recipes, techniques, and post-training best practices to accelerate our collective know-how

Requirements

• PhD or Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a similar technical field with 3+ 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 the complexity of globally distributed inference infrastructure

Qualifications

• 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
• Experience with large scale (many-machine) training infrastructure and techniques for inference with large models such as model sharding/tensor-parallel

Skills

• Strong background in Reinforcement Learning
• Experience with large-scale distributed training and inference
• Ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams

Benefits

Waymo offers a comprehensive benefits package, including:

• Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance
• Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match
• Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment
• Sick Time: 40 hours/year (statutory, where applicable); 5 days/event (discretionary)
• Maternity Leave (Short-Term Disability + Baby Bonding): 28-30 weeks
• Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks
• Holidays: 13 paid days per year