Staff Research Scientist (Foundation Models)

TL;DR

Staff Research Scientist (Foundation Models): Developing and optimizing data recipes for foundation model pre-training and post-training with an accent on data-centric AI and RL recipes. Focus on building a data flywheel, clustering, filtering, and scaling ladders to improve autonomous driving capabilities.

Location: Must be based in the US (Mountain View, San Francisco, or Kirkland). Hybrid role.

Salary: $251,000—$310,000 USD

Company

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company developing the World's Most Experienced Driver to improve mobility and safety.

What you will do

• Own the data recipe for foundation model pre-training and post-training.
• Lead research on clustering, filtering, de-duplication, and long-tail data mining.
• Tech-lead research engineers to build a data flywheel from massive driving data.
• Integrate community research on scaling ladders and RL recipes.
• Collaborate with the research community on data-centric evaluation.
• Partner with internal teams to accelerate collective knowledge on post-training.

Requirements

• PhD or Masters in CS, ML, Robotics, or similar.
• 3+ years of industry or post-doc research experience in Data-centric AI, RL, or Foundation Models.
• High-impact publications (NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR) or significant open-source contributions.
• Proficiency in ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow).
• Must be eligible to work in the US.

Nice to have

• Experience with large-scale foundation model data and recipes.
• ML infra experience (training, evaluating, and deploying at scale).
• Experience with generative models (LLMs/VLMs) or reinforcement learning.

Culture & Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, vision, and life insurance.
• 401(k) retirement plan with company match.
• Generous paid time off: 20 days vacation and 40 hours sick leave per year.
• Extended parental leave (28-30 weeks maternity/baby bonding).
• 13 paid holidays per year.