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Waymo

Research Scientist, World Modeling

On site

San francisco, United states

$ 216,000 /year

Junior

Full Time

08-09-2025

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Skills

Communication Python Research Training Architecture Machine Learning PyTorch TensorFlow Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence

Job Specifications

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 Experienced Driver(tm)--to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now 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. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

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.

In this hybrid role, you will report to a Staff Research Scientist.

You Will

Design and implement generative world modeling solutions to simulate future world states / observations for embodied agents (autonomous vehicles)
Develop and maintain scalable data pipelines to process data from multiple sources
Design and implement evaluation strategies for generative world models
Study and analyze different behaviors of this model, such as scaling efficacy, downstream quality implications, model architecture design ablations, etc
Technical communication to both technical and non-technical audiences regarding research motivations and research findings.
Conducting cutting-edge research and potentially communicating research findings to the wider academic community via technical reports and/or publications

You Have

Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, or in a similar discipline or equivalent practical experience
3+ years of experience with Deep Learning and Generative Models
Familiarity with major ML Frameworks (JAX, Tensorflow, Pytorch)
Strong coding skills in Python

We Prefer

PhD degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, or in a similar discipline or equivalent practical experience
Publications at top-tier conferences like CVPR/ICCV/ECCV/ICLR/ICML/NeurIPS/IROS/CoRL etc.
Substantial involvement in and contributions to high impact industry AI projects
Experience in generative models for domains such as world models, images, videos, 3D, human animation, traffic, and/or simulation using techniques such as diffusion or autoregressive model

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is listed below. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the role location or, if the role can be performed remote, the specific salary range for your preferred location, during the hiring process.

Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo's discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.

Salary Range

$170,000--$216,000 USD

About the Company

On the journey to be the world's most trusted driver. With the Waymo Driver, we can improve mobility while saving thousands of lives. Download the Waymo One app and ride today. Waymo reaches out to candidates from official channels only (e.g. directly from @waymo.com email addresses, or through our recruiters or sourcers who are noted as such on LinkedIn). We do not contact candidates about career opportunities through instant messaging apps like Telegram, email addresses from domains other than waymo.com (such as Gmail add... Know more