Research Scientist, Map Scalability

Location: On site in Mountain View, California; San Francisco, California; or New York City, New York

Salary: $213,000–$263,000 USD annual base salary, plus potential bonus, equity, and benefits.

Company

Waymo develops autonomous driving technology and fully autonomous ride-hail services through the Waymo Driver.

What you will do

• Solve fundamental and applied world-understanding problems for autonomous driving using VLMs, generative modeling, and 3D reconstruction.
• Prototype and iterate on research ideas using internal driving data.
• Scale and productionize world-understanding solutions with engineering teams across Waymo.
• Present findings across Waymo and Alphabet and potentially publish results for the research community.

Requirements

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, or a related discipline.
• 1–3+ years of experience in a related field.
• Expertise in foundational VLMs, computer vision, or learning-based 3D reconstruction methods such as 3DGS or NeRF.
• Strong ML software engineering skills in Python and C++ with rapid prototyping ability.
• Familiarity with JAX, TensorFlow, and PyTorch.

Nice to have

• Publications at top-tier conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, IROS, or CoRL.
• Experience productionizing and scaling ML solutions beyond the research stage.
• Fundamentals in 3D vision or computer graphics.
• Experience in autonomous vehicles or simulation.

Culture & Benefits

• Work with the AI Foundations team on machine learning solutions for safely operating autonomous vehicles in diverse cities and conditions.
• Opportunities to collaborate with research teams across Alphabet.
• Eligibility for a discretionary annual bonus, equity incentive plan, and company benefits program.