Research Scientist, RL for Autonomous Planning & World Modeling

📋 Description

• Hybrid role reporting to a Principal Scientist.
• Work on World Model post-training and evaluation.
• Research and develop RL and Distillation techniques for Autonomous Vehicle Trajectory Planning.
• Integrate research into Waymo’s RL infrastructure with rigorous ablations.
• Collaborate with engineering and research teams to share methods and best practices.

🎯 Requirements

• PhD or Masters in CS, ML, Robotics, or related field with 3+ years RL/Foundation Models research.
• Strong publications or significant open-source contributions demonstrating original work.
• Experience with scalable, distributed model training (data parallel, FSDP, sharding).
• Willingness to work with globally distributed inference infrastructure.

🎁 Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• Retirement: 401(k) with company match.
• PTO: 20 days/year; Sick Time: 40 hours/year; various parental leave options.
• Holidays: 13 paid days/year.