Hybrid Research Scientist, RL for Autonomous Planning – World Modeling

at Waymo

• Job title: Research Scientist, RL for Autonomous Planning – World Modeling
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: $204,000 - $259,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Postgraduate Degree
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Mountain View, United States

About the role

• Research Scientist at Waymo developing RL solutions for Autonomous Vehicle planning and world modeling. Collaborating with teams to enhance AI Foundations for safe vehicle operation.

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

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 complexity of globally distributed inference infrastructure

Benefits

• Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program
• equity incentive plan
• generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements