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Research Scientist, RL for Autonomous Planning & World Modeling

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 Experi

Company

Waymo

Location

Mountain View, CA, USA; San Francisco, CA, USA; Kirkland, WA, USA; New York City, NY, USA

Status

Open

Posted

2026-08-30T02:06:16+00:00

Waymo's AI Foundations team is hiring a research scientist for reinforcement learning in autonomous driving. The work covers post-training and evaluating Waymo's Foundation World Model, developing RL and distillation methods for vehicle trajectory planning, and bringing outside research into Waymo's internal RL infrastructure through ablation studies. The posting asks for a PhD or master's plus three or more years of RL or foundation-model research, a publication or open-source record, and distributed training experience such as data parallel or FSDP sharding. The role reports to a principal scientist.