Senior Research Scientist, Perception

The Waymo AI Foundations team is seeking a researcher to join our efforts in developing state-of-the-art multimodal language models and world models for 3D perception using sensor information from cameras, LiDAR, and radar. This role involves integrating emerging research from the broader AI community into Waymo’s encoders and sensor understanding models, designing and implementing scalable data pipelines for training and evaluation, and creating evaluation frameworks for perception models.

Responsibilities

• Research and develop state-of-the-art multimodal language models and world models for 3D perception using sensor information from cameras, LiDAR, and radar.
• Integrate emerging research from the broader AI community into Waymo’s encoders and sensor understanding models.
• Design and implement scalable data pipelines for training and evaluation to process data from multiple sources.
• Create and maintain evaluation frameworks for perception models.
• Study and analyze different behaviors of the 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.
• Conduct cutting-edge research and potentially communicate research findings to the wider academic community via technical reports and/or publications.

Requirements

• 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 the complexity of globally distributed inference infrastructure.

Preferred 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.
• 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.

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