2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, RSI for Autonomous Driving
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 areas of focus include reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, generative modeling, Bayesian inference, hierarchical learning, and robust evaluation, and it also fosters research collaborations across Alphabet. This internship focuses on research and development for recursive self-improvement (RSI) and foundational models for autonomous driving. The intern will investigate current research, design data and post-training methods for reinforcement learning of the driver in a closed-loop setup using critic and world models, implement the RSI system, and use training results and ablation studies to improve the algorithm. The position is a hybrid onsite internship. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis until the role is filled.
Requirements
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative field.
- Depth in foundational AI model post-training, especially reinforcement learning.
- Fluency with AI coding agents and at least one RL training framework, such as Rex, Verl, or NeMo-RL.
- Fluency in AI model training fundamentals, including transformer architecture, hyperparameter tuning, and debugging overfitting.
- Familiarity with autonomous driving, physics AI, VLA, or world models.
Nice To Haves
- Depth in reinforcement learning for robotics or autonomous driving models.
- Depth in world action models or video generation models.
- Experience in recursive self-improvement training for AI models.
Responsibilities
- Research the state of the art in RSI, physics AI foundational models, autonomous driving foundational models, and World Action models, and connect findings to research projects to improve driver quality.
- Design new data and post-training recipes to reinforce-learn the driver with critic and world models in a closed-loop setup.
- Code and implement the RSI system.
- Inspect training results and ablation studies to iterate on algorithm design.
Benefits
- Eligible to participate in the company’s benefits programs, subject to eligibility requirements.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Intern
Education Level
Ph.D. or professional degree
