2026 Summer Intern, MS / PhD, RL Based Model Optimization

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.

Software Engineering builds the brains of Waymo's fully autonomous driving technology. Our software allows the Waymo Driver to perceive the world around it, make the right decision for every situation, and deliver people safely to their destinations. We think deeply and solve complex technical challenges in areas like robotics, perception, decision-making and deep learning, while collaborating with hardware and systems engineers. If you're a software engineer or researcher who's curious and passionate about Level 4 autonomous driving, we'd like to meet you.

The Model Optimization team plays a critical role in ensuring high-quality, low-latency machine learning models are deployed across the Waymo fleet. Given that onboard performance is essential for both safety and product scalability, our team focuses on developing cutting-edge optimization technologies. These include quantization, custom kernels, and pruning, all designed to enable the most powerful models to operate effectively within the constraints of limited onboard compute resources. We are actively exploring the development of AlphaEvolve-like algorithms for the automated discovery and evolution of novel optimization techniques.

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 :

• Propose and develop an agentic framework for discovering novel and efficient model optimization techniques.
• Propose evaluation methodology for model optimization techniques.
• Propose and develop RL based solutions for optimizing model architecture and implementation.

You have :

We prefer :

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 Masters Pay

$70 — $70 USD

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