# Research Scientist, RL for Autonomous Planning & World Modeling at Waymo

- Company: Waymo
- What the company does: Waymo—formerly the Google self-driving car project—makes it safe and easy for people & things to get around with autonomous vehicles. Take a ride now. Backed by Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia.
- Company website: https://waymo.com/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: Mountain View, CA, USA; San Francisco, CA, USA; Kirkland, WA, USA; New York City, NY, USA
- Work setup: On-site
- Posted: 2026-08-29
- Apply by: 2026-10-19
- Apply: https://careers.withwaymo.com/jobs?gh_jid=8165872&utm_source=1752vc&utm_medium=careers
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/waymo-research-scientist-rl-for-autonomous-planning-and-world-modeling/

## About the role

In this hybrid role, you will report to a Principal Scientist. In accordance with Washington state law, we are highlighting our comprehensive benefits package, which is available to all eligible US based employees. Benefits for this role include: Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.

## What they're looking for

- PhD or Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a similar technical field, with 3+ years of industry or post-doc research experience in Reinforcement Learning or Foundation Models
- Demonstration of original contributions to the field through high-impact publications (ArXiv, peer-reviewed conferences like NeurIPS/ICLR/CVPR), technical blog posts, or significant open-source contributions
- Proficiency in implementing model training flows in a scalable, distributed and performant manner such as Data parallel, FSDP and other sharding approaches
- A willingness to work with complexity of globally distributed inference infrastructure

Tags: AI Foundations (7SJ)

Source: 1752vc Careers, https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/waymo-research-scientist-rl-for-autonomous-planning-and-world-modeling/