2026 Summer Intern, PhD, Software Engineer, Release Evaluation

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.

Waymo's Release Evaluation team ensures that each version of the Waymo Driver is safe before it hits the road. We build automated pipelines to solve the long tail of rare and exceptional scenarios in autonomous driving, applying importance sampling and machine learning to find a needle in a haystack.

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:

• Improve the signal quality of our evaluation workflow to detect issues in the onboard perception system


• Apply generative AI models (VLMs) to develop features providing information about offboard perception detection qualities


• Evaluate the impact of model improvements on the statistical efficiency of the pipeline

You have:

• The ability to program in C++ and navigate large codebases


• Experience with data analysis and statistical estimation

We prefer:

• Experience with C++ and large-scale distributed systems


• Experience with training and evaluating ML models (big or small!)


• Experience with computer vision or perception


• Pursuing a PhD in a quantitative field

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

$60.10—$60.10 USD