2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, Behavior Post-training

Waymo•Mountain View, CA

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

Waymo’s AI Foundations team develops machine learning solutions for open problems in autonomous driving, with the goal of safely operating Waymo vehicles in many cities and under all driving conditions. The team’s current areas of focus include reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, generative modeling, Bayesian inference, hierarchical learning, and robust evaluation, and it also fosters collaborations with other research teams in Alphabet. The intern will work on behavior post-training research, developing methods and tools for sampling, selecting, and discarding synthetic driving data, and testing hypotheses about how that data can improve models. The role includes training and evaluating models using mixtures of synthetic and logged data, and presenting and writing about synthetic data generation and training methods. Waymo describes its internships as collaborative opportunities to contribute to impactful projects while expanding skills.

Requirements

Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
Familiarity with methods of sampling from large models.
Experience with post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning (RL), and preferences.
Experience with modern deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and JAX.

Nice To Haves

Experience working with open- and closed-loop decision-making models in robotics.
Experience with synthetic data generation and evaluation.
Prior projects using LLM-as-a-judge.

Responsibilities

Build tools for sampling, selecting, and discarding synthetic driving data, with testable hypotheses about how the data will lead to improvement.
Train and evaluate models with mixtures of synthetic and logged data.
Present and write about methods for synthetic data generation and training.