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

Mountain View · Posted Oct 20 · $85/hr

Apply

At a glance

Pay: $85/hr
Location: Mountain View, CA
Work type: Hybrid
Visa sponsorship: 38 H-1B filings by this company
Category: Research

Hybrid PhD summer internship at Waymo focusing on AI Foundations, including sampling synthetic data, model training with synthetic/logged data, and methods for synthetic data generation. Hourly pay of $85 USD with benefits. Requires PhD pursuit in CS/ML/Robotics and experience with large-model sampling and post-training methods; preference for robotics decision making and synthetic data evaluation experience.

What they are looking for

Sampling from large modelsPost-training methods (sft, rl, preferences)PytorchJaxReinforcement learning

Location: Mountain View, CA, USA; San Francisco, CA, USA Department: Pipeline (N/A)

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’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

The mission of the Waymo AI Foundations 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. AI Foundations areas that we are currently focusing on include reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, generative modeling, Bayesian inference, hierarchical learning, and robust evaluation.

Waymo interns partner with leaders in the industry on projects that create impact to the company. We believe learning is a two-way street: applying 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!

You will

Build tools for sampling, selecting, and discarding synthetic driving data with testable hypotheses of how that 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

You have

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 SFT, RL, and preferences

Modern deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and Jax

We prefer

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

Note: This will be a hybrid onsite internship position. We will accept resumes on a rolling basis until the role is filled. To be in consideration for multiple roles, you will need to apply to each one individually - please apply to the top 3 roles you are interested in.

The expected hourly rate for this full-time position is listed below. Interns are also eligible to participate in the Company’s generous benefits programs, subject to eligibility requirements.