Research Scientist

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the 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 Role, You'll

• Adapt pretrained multimodal models to the domain of autonomous driving
• Design diverse approaches of world modeling and compare their performance on driving specific tasks (scene description, motion forecasting, object tracking, and planning)
• Develop scaling laws analysis for novel problems in autonomous driving that emerge from training, finetuning, sampling, and distillation
• Collaborating with the planner and perception teams and coordinating cross-functional efforts
  
  

At a Minimum, We'd Like You To Have

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, similar technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience
• In-depth knowledge of designing and training large generative models
• Experience troubleshooting and debugging large training jobs, and curating appropriate datasets
• Experience in distributed training and optimization
• Proficiency in Python
  
  

It's Preferred If You Have

• Masters or PhD, preferably in Machine Learning domain
• Track record of publications in top-tier conferences or leading open source projects in the related fields
• Proficiency in machine learning compiler technologies such as XLA, Triton and distributed training libraries such as DeepSpeed
• Experience in quantization of machine learning model
  
  

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is listed below. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the role location or, if the role can be performed remote, the specific salary range for your preferred location, during the hiring process.

Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.

Salary Range

$158,000—$200,000 USD