2027 Summer Intern, MS/PhD, Software Engineer, Sys Intel & Machine Learning

About this role

Waymo is seeking a summer intern (MS/PhD level) to optimize machine learning models for autonomous driving perception systems. You'll work on parameter-efficient fine-tuning, knowledge distillation, and quantization techniques to deploy cutting-edge Vision Transformers on onboard vehicle hardware.

What you'll do

• Design and implement parameter-efficient fine-tuning modules (LoRA/QLoRA) in JAX/Flax for multi-task Vision Transformer models
• Develop dual-level distillation pipelines to reduce performance degradation during large-scale data scaling
• Collaborate with optimization and quantization teams to validate weight folding and low-precision quantization on automotive accelerators
• Conduct empirical ablations and evaluate perception metrics on autonomous driving datasets across multiple geographic domains
• Benchmark model performance and latency overhead across diverse onboard compute platforms

What they're looking for

• Python and deep learning frameworks (JAX, Flax, PyTorch, TensorFlow)
• Transformer architectures and Vision models
• Model compression and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA, adapters)
• Quantization and knowledge distillation techniques
• Multi-task learning and large-scale model training
• Distributed training on GPU/TPU clusters
• Autonomous driving perception tasks (3D detection, tracking, semantics)

Benefits

• Competitive hourly compensation ($70-$85 depending on degree level)
• Housing/relocation bonus if applicable
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Free meals and snacks onsite, plus free Google shuttle access
• Onsite gym facilities
• Networking and intern community events