2025 Summer Intern, PhD, Research - World Modeling

The mission of the Waymo Research team is to develop machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving, towards the goal of safely operating Waymo vehicles in dozens of cities and under all driving conditions. As part of our work, we also initiate and foster collaborations with other research teams in Alphabet. Research areas that we are currently focusing on include reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, generative modeling, Bayesian inference, hierarchical learning, and robust evaluation.

Waymo interns work alongside leaders in the industry on projects that deliver significant impact to the company. We believe learning is a two-way street: leveraging your knowledge while providing you with opportunities to expand your skill-set. Interns are an important part of our culture and our recruiting pipeline. Join us at Waymo for a fun and rewarding internship!

You will:

• Develop a novel architecture for an end-to-end world model for self-driving vehicle planning.
• Investigate scaling law properties of the models.
• Apply model optimizations and efficient deep learning techniques and benchmark their quality and performance.

You have:

• Currently enrolled in a PhD program in computer science, statistics, applied mathematics, physics, or a related technical field of study.
• Strong track record of high-quality research in machine learning, computer vision, and computer architecture.
• Hands-on experience with world modeling, LLM (Large Language Models), VLMs (Video Language Models), and/or multimodal models.

We prefer:

• Publications from top peer-reviewed conferences (eg: NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR).
• Hands-on experience in scaling law analysis.
• Experience with JAX.

Note: This will be a hybrid onsite internship position. We will accept resumes on a rolling basis until the role is filled. To be in consideration for multiple roles, you will need to apply to each one individually - please apply to the top 3 roles you are interested in.

At Waymo, we don't just accept differences - we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it for the benefit of our employees, our products and our community. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.

#LI-Hybrid