Staff Research Scientist, Perception

Job Summary

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. The ideal candidate will have expertise in reinforcement learning, foundation models, and multi-modal learning.

About the Role

This role involves working on a hybrid schedule and reporting to a Principal Research Scientist. The primary responsibilities include researching and developing advanced perception models, integrating emerging research from the broader AI community, and designing and implementing scalable data pipelines and evaluation frameworks.

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.
• Partner with engineering and research teams across Waymo to share recipes, techniques, and best practices to accelerate collective knowledge.
• Develop and maintain scalable data pipelines for training and evaluation to process data from multiple sources.
• Design and implement 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 4+ 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.
• 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.

Skills

• Expertise in Reinforcement Learning and Foundation Models.
• Experience with multi-modal learning and sensor fusion.
• Strong programming skills in Python, C++, or equivalent languages.
• Knowledge of distributed systems and cloud computing.

Benefits

Waymo offers a comprehensive benefits package, including:

• Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance
• Retail Benefits: 401(k) with company match
• Paid Time Off: 20 days 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