The role
From Waymo's own posting.
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.
Software Engineering builds the brains of Waymo's fully autonomous driving technology. Our software allows the Waymo Driver to perceive the world around it, make the right decision for every situation, and deliver people safely to their destinations. We think deeply and solve complex technical challenges in areas like robotics, perception, decision-making and deep learning, while collaborating with hardware and systems engineers. If you’re a software engineer or researcher who’s curious and passionate about Level 4 autonomous driving, we'd like to meet you.
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:
Train and fine-tune a large multi-task transformer over driving-log sequences, in JAX/Flax on TPUs - iterating on fine-tuning strategies, training data mixtures, and losses to improve evaluation quality for the hillclimbing workflow
Design and run rigorous offline and end-to-end evaluations - PR-AUC, calibration quality, and metric sensitivity on real hillclimbing A/B runs - and build the dataset and evaluation pipelines needed to produce them
Land production-quality code in a shared, high-traffic codebase, and communicate results through a design doc, team deep dives, and a final intern presentation, partnering with UEM Core, Data Science, and release-eval stakeholders
You have:
Currently enrolled in an PhD or MS program in Computer Science, Machine Learning or a related field, returning to the program after the internship
Hands-on experience training and evaluating deep learning models in a modern framework (JAX, PyTorch or TensorFlow), including building data pipelines, choosing losses, and debugging training runs
Strong programming skills in C++/Python, plus a solid grounding in ML fundamentals: precision/recall trade-offs, class imbalance, evaluation metric selection, and rigorous experiment design
We prefer:
Authorship of published papers in top-tier AI/ML, data mining, or computer vision conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, CVPR, CoRL, SIGMOD, VLDB, ACL)
Research or applied experience with transformer and sequence models, multi-task learning, transfer learning or domain adaptation, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large pretrained models
Experience with JAX/Flax, distributed training on TPUs or GPUs, and large-scale data processing (MapReduce-style pipelines, SQL) for building training and evaluation datasets
Familiarity with autonomous driving, robotics, or simulation; and/or with probability calibration, uncertainty quantification, importance sampling, active learning, or rare-event and imbalanced-data modeling
General Perks
Help solve challenging problems with a direct impact on the company
Competitive compensation packages with a housing/relocation bonus (if applicable)
Medical, dental, and vision insurance
Fun intern events and networking opportunities
Onsite Perks
Free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks
Free access to Google shuttles
Onsite gym
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.
Hourly Masters Pay
$70 — $70 USD
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.
Hourly PhD Pay
$85 — $85 USD