PhD Machine Learning Summer Intern

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. Since starting as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver, described as the world's most experienced driver, to improve access to mobility and save thousands of lives lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo's fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. It has provided over ten million rider-only trips, built on more than 100 million miles driven autonomously on public roads and tens of billions of miles in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

Software Engineering builds the brains of Waymo's autonomous driving technology. Our software lets the Waymo Driver perceive the world around it, make the right decision in every situation, and deliver people safely to their destinations. We tackle complex technical challenges in robotics, perception, decision-making and deep learning, working closely with hardware and systems engineers. If you are a software engineer or researcher curious about and passionate about Level 4 autonomous driving, we would like to meet you.

Waymo interns work with leaders in the industry on projects that have real impact on the company. We believe learning goes both ways: you apply your knowledge while gaining chances to grow your skill set. Interns are an important part of our culture and our recruiting pipeline.

What You Will Do

• Design, implement, and scale controllable generation and test-time compute algorithms, multimodal conditioning, and critic-guided flow and diffusion steering for foundation world models.
• Investigate multimodal sensor and semantic latent conditioning, along with representation alignment, to move toward holistic world simulation.
• Use learned realism critics and agentic autoresearch workflows on large-scale TPU clusters to evaluate closed-loop interactive realism, long-tail scenario synthesis, and multimodal consistency.
• Write clean, modular, well-tested JAX code in core simulation and world-modeling codebases, working closely with researchers on the Sim Realism, Foundation Models, and Closed-Loop Training teams.

This is a hybrid onsite internship. Resumes are accepted on a rolling basis until the role is filled. To be considered for multiple roles, you must apply to each one individually, so please apply to the top 3 roles you are interested in.