Research Scientist, Map Scalability

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.

You will:

• Solve fundamental and applied research problems related to world understanding using VLMs, generative modeling and 3D reconstruction at large scale.
• Prototype and iterate on various research ideas using Waymo's internal driving data
• Scale and productionize world understanding solutions in collaboration with engineering teams across Waymo
• Present research findings to a wide audience within Waymo and Alphabet, with the possibility of publishing results to the research community

• Master’s or PhD degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, or in a similar discipline.
• 1-3+ years of experience in a related field.
• Expert in either Foundational VLMs, Computer Vision or learning-based 3D reconstruction methods (3DGS, NeRF).
• Strong ML software engineering skills in Python/C++ with an ability to rapidly prototype solutions.
• Familiarity with major ML Frameworks (JAX, Tensorflow, Pytorch).

Nice to have

• Publications at top-tier conferences like CVPR/ICCV/ECCV/ICLR/ICML/NeurIPS/IROS/CoRL etc.
• Hands-on experience productionizing and scaling ML solutions beyond the research stage.
• Fundamentals in 3D vision and/or computer graphics.
• Domain experience in the autonomous vehicle or simulation space.