2026 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, Multimodal Large Language Models

<div class="content-intro"><p>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™—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.</p></div><p data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><span data-sheets-root="1">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.</span></p> <p data-pm-slice="1 1 []">&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>You will:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Frame open-ended, real-world problems into well-defined AI problems.</li> <li>Develop and apply cutting-edge ML approaches to these problems.</li> <li>Scale your methods to Alphabet-sized data and potentially streamline them to run in real-time on cars.</li> <li>Aim to publish findings in academic conferences and journals.</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>You have:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a similar technical field of study.</li> <li>Experience solving problems using cutting-edge AI tech stacks.</li> <li>Ability to collaborate within and across teams.</li> <li>Strong experience programming in Python and deep learning frameworks such as JAX and/or PyTorch.</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>We prefer:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Strong track record of high quality ML research, for example, demonstrated by conference publications in venues such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CoRL, etc.</li> <li>Experience specifically with pre-training and/or post-training LLMs, agentic AI, computer vision, or representation learning.</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>General Perks:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Help solve challenging problems with a direct impact on the company</li> <li>Competitive compensation packages with a housing/relocation bonus (if applicable)</li> <li>Medical, dental, and vision insurance</li> <li>Fun intern events and networking opportunities</li> </ul> <p><strong>Onsite Perks:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks&nbsp;</li> <li>Free access to Google shuttles</li> <li>Onsite gym</li> </ul> <p>Note: This will be a hybrid onsite internship position. We will accept resumes on a rolling basis until the role is filled. To be in consideration for multiple roles, you will need to apply to each one individually - please apply to the top 3 roles you are interested in.</p> <p>At Waymo, we don’t just accept differences - we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it for the benefit of our employees, our products and our community. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.</p><div class="content-pay-transparency"><div class="pay-input"><div class="description"><div>The expected hourly rate for this full-time position is listed below. Interns are also eligible to participate in the Company’s generous benefits programs, subject to eligibility requirements.</div></div><div class="title">Hourly PhD Pay</div><div class="pay-range"><span>$85</span><span class="divider">&mdash;</span><span>$85 USD</span></div></div></div>