2024 Intern, PhD Research Scientist, Perception/Behavior Prediction
Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they’re going. Since our start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has been focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World’s Most Experienced Driver™—to improve everyone's access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. Our Waymo Driver powers Waymo One, our fully autonomous ride-hailing service, as well as Waymo Via, our trucking and local delivery service. To date, Waymo has driven over 20 million miles autonomously on public roads across 25 U.S. cities and conducted over 20 billion miles of simulation testing.
At Waymo, we are mission-driven and believe deeply in the opportunity of autonomous driving technology to improve mobility and make people's lives better. We are united by purpose and responsibility (for our employees and riders alike). We are looking for kind, committed, employees who have integrity, dream big, work together as one team and create a sense of belonging for one another that is the foundation of our culture. We want each team member to feel welcomed and included in every step of our exciting journey.
The mission of the Waymo Research team is to develop machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving, towards the goal of safely operating Waymo vehicles in dozens of cities and under all driving conditions. As part of our work, we also initiate and foster collaborations with other research teams in Alphabet. Research areas that we are currently focusing on include reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, generative modeling, Bayesian inference, hierarchical learning, and robust evaluation.
Waymo interns work alongside leaders in the industry on projects that deliver significant impact to the company. We believe learning is a two-way street: leveraging your knowledge while providing you with opportunities to expand your skill-set. Interns are an important part of our culture and our recruiting pipeline. Join us at Waymo for a fun and rewarding internship!
In this role, you’ll:
- Work with a creative team of people who are responsible for ensuring that the behavior of our cars is safe, smooth, and predictable to other road users, which includes gracefully handling many complex situations involving social aspects (merging, negotiating narrow roads, etc), while dealing with noisy, uncertain, and incomplete information.
- Frame the open-ended real-world problems into well-defined ML problems; develop and apply cutting-edge ML approaches (deep learning, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, etc) to these problems; scale them to Google-sized data pipelines; and streamline them to run in real-time on the cars.
- Collaborate with other teams, including the ML infrastructure, simulation and systems engineering teams, as well as Google Brain, DeepMind and academia.
- Get an opportunity to publish findings in academic conferences and journals
At a minimum we’d like you to have:
- Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Computer Science, Robotics, similar technical field of study.
- Experience solving problems using machine learning.
- Ability to collaborate within and across teams.
- Strong experience programming in Python.
It’s preferred if you have:
- Strong track record of high quality ML research, for example demonstrated by conference publications in venues such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, etc.
- Experience specifically with 3D perception, sequence modeling, multi-modal representation learning or model scaling.
- Experiences with Tensorflow or JAX, or equivalent tools.
While at Waymo, you will enjoy benefits that cover…
Health and wellness: Our people are at the heart of everything we do. At Waymo, you can enjoy top-notch medical, dental and vision insurance, mental wellness support, a Flexible Spending Account (FSA), a Health Saving Account (HSA), on-site physicians and/or nurses in some locations, and special wellness programs.
Financial wellness: Your financial peace of mind is important to us. At Waymo, we offer competitive compensation, bonus opportunities, equity, a generous 401(k) plan or regional retirement plans, 1-on-1 financial coaching, a 529 College Savings Plan and lots of other perks and employee discounts.
Flexibility and time off: Take the time you need to relax and recharge. Enjoy the flexibility to work from another location for four weeks per year. We support an on-site, hybrid work model and offer remote working opportunities, paid time off, Waymo recharge days, bereavement, sick, and parental leave.
Supporting families: When it comes to growing your family or caring for your loved ones, you have our full support. Enhanced leave options include paid parental leave (birthing parent gets 24 weeks of paid leave, and non-birthing parent gets 18 weeks of paid leave), and 20 subsidized days of backup childcare or adult/elder care. Access to fertility care or adoption support as you grow your family.
Community and personal development: At Waymo, you’ll find a range of opportunities to grow, connect, and give back. We offer education tuition reimbursement, personal and professional development, mentorship, and other ways to connect through Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), other internal groups, and even time off to volunteer.
Cool perks: Access to Google offices, cafes, wellness centers, personal training sessions, massages, haircuts, bike repairs, office transportation, commuter benefits and so much more. To support your wellbeing at home, you can enjoy at-home fitness and cooking classes, and more.
* Please note that while our benefits philosophy is the same in every place Waymonauts work, benefits may vary by office/country and are subject to eligibility requirements.