Staff Research Scientist, Foundation Models Recipes
Mountain View, CA, San Francisco, CA, Kirkland, WA$251k - $310kFull-TimePosted 1mo ago
About the role
Staff Research Scientist role focusing on data recipes and foundations models within Waymo AI Foundations. Hybrid role with on-site reporting to Senior Director of AI Foundations. Located in Mountain View, CA; San Francisco, CA; Kirkland, WA.
Responsibilities
- Own the data recipe for Waymo’s Foundation Model pre-training and post-training
- Lead and drive science on best practices around clustering, filtering, de-duplication, long-tail data mining, memorization, etc.
- Tech-lead a team of research engineers to build the data flywheel to enable the above from Waymo’s massive driving data
- Integrate emerging research from the broader community to do rigorous ablations and promising data research techniques. This includes scaling ladders for pre-training, data mix optimizations and RL recipes (preferences) for post-training.
- Engage with the wider research community on best practices around data centric evaluation creation and refinement
- Partner with engineering and research teams across Waymo to share recipes, techniques, and post-training best practices to accelerate our collective know-how
Qualifications
- 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 Data-centric AI, 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 and in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of an ML framework (e.g. Pytorch, JAX, Tensorflow)
- Deep learning experience, especially with generative models, e.g., LLMs/VLMs, and/or reinforcement learning
Skills
Required:Data-centric AIReinforcement LearningGenerative ModelingML Frameworks
Benefits
- Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance
- Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match
- Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment
- Sick Time: 40 hours/year (statutory, where applicable); 5 days/event (discretionary)
- Maternity Leave (Short-Term Disability + Baby Bonding): 28-30 weeks
- Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks
- Holidays: 13 paid days per year
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Waymo
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Waymo—formerly the Google self-driving car project—makes it safe and easy for people & things to get around with autonomous vehicles.
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