2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research Scientist Intern

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!

As a summer intern on the Critic Frontier / Applied Research Team, you will:

• Leverage SOTA foundation model at Alphabet and research relevant literature to build a foundation critic model
• Tackle problems such as avoiding shortcut learning, instill appropriate “thinking” mode into the model, prototype an auto-researcher / RSI loop, etc
• Prototype research solutions to current system bottlenecks (shortcut learning, sensitivity w.r.t inputs, etc.)
• Ideally own an medium-to-large scale E2E research project to develop the next-gen critic model at Waymo

• Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related quantitative field
• Foundational ML knowledge (pre-LLM era)
• Expert knowledge on LLM, VLM, VLA
• Strong software development experience in Python and debugging capability

Nice to have

• Strong knowledge in RL
• Understanding of how modern “thinking” mode works