2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, VLM Harnesses for AV Planning

Waymo is hiring a 2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, VLM Harnesses for AV Planning in Mountain View, United States. It pays $85/hr and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.

Level's read on this job

Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this role: the job is building AI systems.
The posting mentions PyTorch, Jax and computer vision among its tools and skills.
Level classes it as an internship.
Waymo has 365 other open roles on Level.
This posting went up in the last few days.

AI in this role

pytorchjax

computer-vision

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.

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.

Waymo interns partner with leaders in the industry on projects that create impact to the company. We believe learning is a two-way street: applying your knowledge while providing you with opportunities to expand your skill-set. Interns are an important part of our culture and our recruiting pipeline. Join us at Waymo for a fun and rewarding internship!

You will:

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 to both technical and non-technical audiences regarding research motivations and research findings
Conduct cutting-edge research and potentially communicate research findings to the wider academic community via technical reports and/or publications

You have:

Currently enrolled in a PhD program in computer science, statistics, applied mathematics, physics, or a related technical field of study
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 (such as 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 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.

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.Hourly PhD Pay$85—$85 USD

How we rate this

2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, VLM Harnesses for AV Planning at Waymo rates 96 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.

Key facts

2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Research, VLM Harnesses for AV Planning is an open job at Waymo.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The listed pay is $85/hr.
The role is based in Mountain View, CA, USA.
The job was posted on October 19, 2026.
Seniority: intern.
Applications are handled by Waymo. Apply on Waymo

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Computer visionPyTorchJax

Questions you could be asked

Walk me through a computer vision problem you solved, from raw data to a deployed model.
Walk me through how you've used PyTorch in your day-to-day work.
What are the limits of Jax that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: Computer vision, PyTorch, and Jax. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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