Research Scientist, RL for Autonomous Planning & World Modeling
Core
Develop reinforcement learning and distillation techniques for autonomous vehicle trajectory planning and participate in Waymo's Foundation World Model post-training and evaluation.
Role type
Research Scientist, RL for Autonomous Planning & World Modeling
Builds
Waymo's Foundation World Model and RL infrastructure for autonomous driving
Domain
Autonomous driving, Reinforcement Learning, Foundation Models
Deliverable
production ML models
Required skills
Reinforcement Learning, Foundation Models, Model Training Flows (Data parallel, FSDP), Distributed Inference, Ablation Studies, Research Integration
Preferred skills
On-policy Learning, Human Preference Alignment, Large-scale Model Training (Tensor-parallel), Multi-modal Learning
Technologies
FSDP, Data parallel, Tensor-parallel, ArXiv, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ICRA
Responsibilities
Research and develop cutting edge RL and Distillation techniques for Autonomous Vehicle Trajectory Planning; Participate in Waymo's Foundation World Model post-training and evaluation; Integrate emerging research from the broader AI community into Waymo's internal RL infrastructure; Conduct rigorous ablations to identify and scale the most promising methods; Partner with engineering and research teams to share recipes, techniques, and post-training best practices.
Seniority
Senior, hands-on IC