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2027 Summer Intern, Research Scientist
Waymo
About the Role
Waymo is seeking a PhD student for a Summer Intern role in Visual Reasoning. This internship offers an opportunity to work on projects that create impact for the company, applying your knowledge while expanding your skill-set.
Key Responsibilities
- Research and develop novel visual and spatio-temporal reasoning methods for multimodal Perception Foundation Models using AV sensor data.
- Design and implement post-training recipes—including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL)—to improve perception generalization in long-tail autonomous driving scenarios.
- Conduct large-scale experiments and ablation studies on autonomous driving benchmarks, with the opportunity to publish findings at top-tier AI/CV conferences (e.g., CVPR/ICCV/ECCV/NeurIPS/ICLR/ICML).
Requirements & Tech Stack
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Electrical Engineering or a related technical field.
- Hands-on experience & strong publications in perception, and/or LLM/VLM.
- Knowledge of pre-training and post-training of large foundation models.
- Strong Python coding skills with expertise in modern deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow).
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with visual reasoning for LLM/VLM/robotics/driving.
- Experience with RL training in LLM/VLM/robotics.
- Experience with open-vocabulary perception.
Note: This will be a hybrid onsite internship position.
Hourly PhD Pay: $85 USD