Senior Research Scientist, Foundation Model (LLM/VLM)

Senior Research Scientist, Foundation Model (LLM/VLM)

Waymo

Position type: Full‑time

Location: New York

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company that develops the Waymo Driver to improve mobility and safety. The Applied Research team develops machine learning solutions for autonomous driving challenges and collaborates with other Alphabet research teams.

In this hybrid role you will report to a Technical Lead Manager.

Responsibilities

• Conduct applied foundation model research and development
• Design and run experiments training and evaluating large deep learning models
• Present results to peers and leadership
• Write high quality code, unit tests, and documentation

Qualifications

• Masters or Ph.D. in deep learning, behavior and agent modeling or simulation
• Proficiency in Python
• 3+ years of experience with modern deep learning frameworks (prefer JAX or TensorFlow 2; PyTorch acceptable)
• Experience in generative modeling and LLMs or VLMs (e.g., Gemini, Llama, GPT)

Preferred Skills

• Post‑training techniques, including reinforcement learning
• Model distillation
• Transformer models
• Autoencoders and embeddings

Benefits

Base salary range: $204,000—$259,000 USD (adjusted by location, experience, education, and skill level).

Eligibility for discretionary annual bonus, equity incentive plan, and generous company benefits program.