Jobs / United States / Waymo LLC
2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Data Science
Waymo LLC · 🇺🇸 Mountain View, CA, USA; San Francisco, CA, USA
Sponsorship verdict
Sponsorship possible
One solid signal, not two — worth applying, and worth asking about sponsorship early.
- Employer is on a government sponsor recordThe US Department of Labor certified 290 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 87 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- What Waymo LLC paid sponsored hires in similar roles19 certified filings for “Data Scientist” (Data Scientists) in CA: $197k–$230k, median $205k. Most were filed at wage level III (50%) — 3 lottery entries, ≈46% projected selection odds for cap-subject employers. Source: US Department of Labor LCA disclosure data (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026).
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
A verdict summarises public evidence; it is not legal advice and never a guarantee — the employer and the immigration authority decide. Sign in to factor in where you can already work.
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Sponsor Radar — Waymo LLC
The US Department of Labor certified 290 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 87 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for Waymo LLC →
About the role
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. Data Scientists at Waymo work on a wide variety of evaluation and modeling problems, including safety evaluation, the simulation technology, driving quality and rider experience. Furthermore, data scientists conduct rigorous analysis of the Waymo Driver performance across software releases, new territories, hardware generations, and throughout the software development process. This role works with a variety of teams across the company to inject data science rigor and perspective, and to influence development direction in many of the critical systems in self-driving technology and fleet operations. As a Data Science intern, you may join one of these Data Science Subteams: • World Model Eval • Safety Eval Tech • Safety Data Science • Driving Quality Data Science • Simulation Data Science • Pre-Release Data Science • Expansion Discovery 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! In this internship, you might: • Analyze large-scale on-road and simulation data to build metrics, statistical models, and predictive features that quantify the Waymo Driver's safety and driving quality performance • Develop and enable rigorous evaluation of the Waymo Driver through curating a principled portfolio of tools to assess and inform software development at scale • Inform development work on the Waymo Driver by leveraging quantitative analysis to provide early behavioral evaluation of software releases and provide actionable insights for Waymo’s expansion efforts into new territories and hardware platforms • Take challenging open-ended research problems and translate them into concrete solutions or prototypes in an empirical setting (e.g., publications, open-source project contribution, internal tools) • Develop and validate statistical / ML methodology — estimation, uncertainty quantification, sampling, and extrapolation — to use or evaluate large-scale foundation models and draw reliable conclusions about rare and critical events from limited data • Build tools and pipelines that turn one-off analyses into repeatable workflows, partnering with engineering teams to automate data exploration, triage, and reporting You have: • Pursuing PhD in a quantitative field (e.g. Statistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, Computational Social Science) • Proficiency in programming with Python (or R), including data manipulation, wrangling, and visualization • Strong statistical theory foundation We prefer: • Experience in machine learning applications and complex data analysis, or familiarity with SQL and/or C/C++ • Experience in processing and interpreting high dimensional data such as images/videos • Demonstrated research capabilities through publications and a strong understanding of statistical methodologies and founda