Research Scientist, RL for Autonomous Planning & World Modeling (AI)

Location: On-site in Mountain View, San Francisco, New York City, or Kirkland, United States. The role is described as hybrid, and remote availability depends on the specific location.

Salary: $204,000–$259,000 USD per year, plus eligibility for an annual bonus and equity incentive plan.

Company

Waymo develops autonomous driving technology and the Waymo Driver for fully autonomous ride-hail services and other vehicle platforms.

What you will do

• Participate in foundation world model post-training and evaluation.
• Research and develop reinforcement learning and distillation techniques for autonomous vehicle trajectory planning.
• Integrate emerging AI research into internal reinforcement learning infrastructure.
• Conduct rigorous ablation studies to identify and scale promising methods.
• Collaborate with engineering and research teams across Waymo on post-training practices and technical methods.

Requirements

• PhD or master’s degree in computer science, machine learning, robotics, or a related technical field.
• 3+ years of industry or postdoctoral research experience in reinforcement learning or foundation models.
• Original contributions demonstrated through high-impact publications, technical blog posts, or significant open-source work.
• Proficiency implementing scalable, distributed, and performant model-training flows, including data parallelism and FSDP.
• Willingness to work with the complexity of globally distributed inference infrastructure.

Nice to have

• Research focus on reinforcement learning, foundation models, or multimodal learning.
• Experience designing and deploying reinforcement learning infrastructure for on-policy learning or alignment with human preferences.
• First-author publications at top-tier venues or significant open-source machine learning projects.
• Experience with large-scale training infrastructure, model sharding, or tensor-parallel inference.

Culture & Benefits

• Health, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance for eligible US-based employees.
• 401(k) retirement benefits with company matching.
• Paid vacation, sick time, holidays, maternity leave, and baby bonding leave.
• Collaboration with research teams across Waymo and Alphabet.
• Access to discretionary bonus and equity incentive programs, subject to eligibility.