Senior Research Scientist, Foundation Model for Simulation

Waymo • Mountain View, CA

133d • $204,000 - $259,000

About The Position

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo One, a fully autonomous ride-hailing service, and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over one million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving tens of millions of miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 13+ U.S. states. The mission of the Waymo Applied Research team is to develop machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving, towards the goal of the 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. In this hybrid role you will report to a Director of Research.

Requirements

• Masters or PhD in deep learning in behavior and agent modeling or simulation
• Proficiency in Python
• 3+ years of experience with modern deep learning frameworks. Prefer JAX or TensorFlow 2; however, Pytorch is acceptable.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with generative modeling
• Experience with LLMs or VLMs (e.g., Gemini, Llama, GPT)
• Experience with post-training, including reinforcement learning
• Experience with distillation
• Experience with transformer models
• Experience with autoencoders and embeddings

Responsibilities

• Conduct applied foundation model research and development
• Design compelling experiments by training and evaluating large deep learning models
• Present results to peers and leadership
• Write high quality code, unit tests, and documentation

Benefits

• Discretionary annual bonus program
• Equity incentive plan
• Generous Company benefits program

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: Master's degree
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees