Waymo · 5 hours ago
Research Scientist, RL for Autonomous Planning & World Modeling
Mountain View, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Mid, Senior Level
$204K/yr - $259K/yr
3+ years expWaymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. They are seeking a Research Scientist to develop machine learning solutions for autonomous driving, focusing on reinforcement learning and world modeling techniques. The role involves collaborating with engineering and research teams to advance Waymo's internal RL infrastructure and improve autonomous vehicle trajectory planning.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)AutomotiveAutonomous VehiclesSensorTransportation
Responsibilities
Participate in Waymo’s Foundation World Model post-training and evaluation
Research and 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
Qualification
Required
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 complexity of globally distributed inference infrastructure
Preferred
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
Benefits
Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program
Equity incentive plan
Generous Company benefits program
Company
Waymo
Waymo is a mobility technology company that improves transportation by developing self-driving solutions for travelers and daily commuters. It is a sub-organization of Alphabet.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Waymo has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (231)
2024 (175)
2023 (268)
2022 (306)
2021 (298)
2020 (317)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$11.1BKey Investors
Alphabet
2024-07-23Series C· $5.6B
2021-06-16Series B· $2.5B
2020-05-12Series A· $750M
Leadership Team
Tekedra Mawakana
Co-Chief Executive Officer
Annabel Chang
Head of State Policy & Government Relations
Recent News
2026-01-16
2026-01-16
Company data provided by crunchbase