2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, VLM Harnesses for AV Planning
Waymo · Mountain View, CA, USA
About this role
**Waymo — 2027 Summer Intern (PhD) | Research: VLM Harnesses for AV Planning** Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world’s most trusted driver. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can be applied across a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The mission of the Waymo AI Foundations team is to develop machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving—towards safely operating Waymo vehicles in dozens of cities and under all driving conditions. --- ## What you will do - Design and implement scenario preprocessors (e.g., visual rendering, scene representations, and multimodal prompting) to effectively present driving scenarios to state-of-the-art VLMs - Develop postprocessors that translate VLM outputs into feasible, safe trajectories for closed-loop vehicle control - Evaluate VLM driving harnesses in closed-loop autonomous driving simulation and iterate on representations based on driving metrics - Communicate research motivations and findings to both technical and non-technical audiences - Conduct cutting-edge research and potentially share results with the academic community via technical reports and/or publications ## What you have - Currently enrolled in a PhD program in computer science, statistics, applied mathematics, physics, or a related technical field - Familiarity with major ML frameworks (JAX, PyTorch) - Experience using coding agents for auto-research - 3+ years of experience with deep learning, computer vision, and generative models (e.g., VLMs/LLMs) ## We prefer - Publications at top-tier conferences such as CVPR/ICCV/ECCV/ICLR/ICML/NeurIPS/IROS/CoRL, etc. - Substantial involvement in and contributions to high-impact industry AI projects - Experience with vision-language models (VLMs), multimodal prompting/reasoning, or autonomous driving simulation and planning --- **Note:** This is a hybrid onsite internship position. Resumes will be accepted on a rolling basis until the role is filled. If you want to be considered for multiple roles, you must apply to each one individually—please apply to the top 3 roles you’re interested in. **Pay (Hourly PhD Pay):** $85–$85 USD per hour
Listing freshness
CronJobs last confirmed this listing 1h ago. If its source stops confirming the opening for seven days, this page is removed from active inventory.