Senior Research Scientist, AI Foundations Recipes (AI)

Salary: £123,000–£129,000 GBP per year, plus potential annual bonus, equity, and company benefits.

Company

Waymo develops autonomous driving technology and operates a fully autonomous ride-hail service powered by the Waymo Driver.

What you will do

• Partner with foundation model training teams to optimize data mixtures, training curricula, objectives, and other model design choices.
• Design global-scale pipelines for dynamically updating and reusing datasets as new data is ingested.
• Develop and deploy data-selection algorithms for fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.
• Run large-scale studies linking pre-training data composition to post-training performance and translate findings into production training runs.
• Collaborate with behavior, perception, and evaluation teams to measure the impact of foundation models on the Waymo Driver.

Requirements

• PhD in machine learning or a related AI/computer science field, or an MSc with a strong academic publication record.
• Strong knowledge of statistics and machine learning.
• Proficiency in Python.
• At least 3 years of experience with modern deep learning frameworks such as JAX, TensorFlow, or PyTorch.
• Ability to work in a hybrid/on-site setup in London or Oxford.

Nice to have

• Experience deploying machine learning models to production.
• Experience with generative models, LLMs, VLMs, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, transformers, autoencoders, or embeddings.
• Autonomous driving experience.
• C++ experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on machine learning systems for safely operating autonomous vehicles across diverse cities and driving conditions.
• Collaborate with research teams across Waymo and Alphabet.
• Eligibility for a discretionary annual bonus program and equity incentive plan.
• Company benefits are available subject to eligibility requirements.