About the role#
This is a full-time, paid research internship for Summer 2027. You will join the AI Foundations team to work on autonomous driving planning policies. This role is hybrid and based in Mountain View, California.
What you'll do#
- Design, implement, and benchmark a system where LLM meta-agents generate, synthesize, and refine reward functions for planning policies.
- Diagnose policy failure modes, reward exploitation, and multi-objective trade-offs, then integrate your findings into the automated discovery loop.
- Collaborate with scientists and engineers to transfer validated reward formulations and tooling into planner recipes.
- Document research outcomes, distill key design patterns, and prepare your findings for internal tech transfers or conference publication.
What you'll need#
- You are currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative field.
- Strong hands-on experience in Reinforcement Learning (RL / RLFT) and training deep learning policies with PyTorch or JAX.
- Proficiency in Python and modern machine learning engineering practices.
- Familiarity with autonomous vehicle planning, trajectory optimization, or sequential decision-making under uncertainty.
- A track record of peer-reviewed publications at top AI or robotics conferences such as NeurIPS, ICRA, IROS, CoRL, ICML, ICLR, or CVPR.
- Experience with LLM-guided code generation, automated reward discovery, or meta-RL methods.
- Hands-on experience with RL or RLFT training in LLM, VLM, or robotics.
- A proven ability to independently drive an exploratory research problem from ideation to implementation and results.
Location & details#
- Location: Mountain View, CA.
- Modality: Hybrid.
- Term: Summer 2027.
- Compensation: $85 per hour.
About Waymo
Waymo is a technology company that develops automated driving systems. It focuses on mobility and road safety through its Waymo Driver technology. The firm operates as a private organization and employs between 1,001 and 5,000 people. It was founded in 2009 and maintains its headquarters in Mountain View, California.
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