Senior Research Scientist, Perception (AI)

TL;DR

Senior Research Scientist, Perception (AI/ML): Developing state-of-the-art Multimodal LLMs and World models for 3D Perception with an accent on sensor understanding and scalable data pipelines. Focus on integrating emerging AI research, designing evaluation frameworks, and analyzing model scaling efficacy to improve autonomous driving safety.

Location: Hybrid (USA). Must be based in Mountain View, San Francisco, New York City, or Kirkland.

Salary: $213,000—$263,000 USD

Company

An autonomous driving technology company building the Waymo Driver to improve global mobility and save lives through fully autonomous ride-hailing services.

What you will do

• Research and develop Multimodal LLMs and World models for 3D Perception using Camera, LiDAR, and Radar data.
• Integrate emerging research from the AI community into Waymo’s encoders and sensor understanding models.
• Develop and maintain scalable data pipelines for model training and evaluation.
• Design and implement perception modeling solutions and evaluation frameworks.
• Analyze model behaviors, including scaling efficacy and architecture design ablations.
• Communicate research findings to the academic community via technical reports and publications.

Requirements

• PhD or Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a similar technical field.
• 2+ years of industry or post-doc research experience in Reinforcement Learning or Foundation Models.
• Demonstrated original contributions via high-impact publications (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR).
• Proficiency in implementing scalable distributed model training flows (e.g., Data parallel, FSDP).
• Ability to work with the complexity of globally distributed inference infrastructure.

Nice to have

• PhD focus on Reinforcement Learning, Foundation Models, or Multi-Modal learning.
• Experience deploying RL infrastructure for on-policy learning or human preference alignment.
• Experience with generative models for 3D, images, or video using diffusion or autoregressive techniques.

Culture & Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• Retirement benefits with 401(k) and company match.
• Generous paid time off, including 20 days of vacation and statutory sick time.
• Extensive parental leave (28-30 weeks maternity/baby bonding).
• Eligibility for discretionary annual bonus and equity incentive plans.