Software Engineering builds the brains of Waymo's fully autonomous driving technology. Our software allows the Waymo Driver to perceive the world around it, make the right decision for every situation, and deliver people safely to their destinations. We think deeply and solve complex technical challenges in areas like robotics, perception, decision-making and deep learning, while collaborating with hardware and systems engineers. If you’re a software engineer or researcher who’s curious and passionate about Level 4 autonomous driving, we'd like to meet you. 

The Perception Sensing team’s job is to make sure that sensors “just work” for the entire autonomous driving vehicle software stack. We make sure we have the right sensors, that they are properly calibrated and validated and that the software pipeline that streams sensor data into other modules of our onboard system is optimized for performance and usability. We design APIs that abstract away hardware details and provide convenient and fast access to the GBs of information that flow in from the physical sensors. We are responsible for the initial processing of the raw sensor signals including combining data from multiple sources, filtering and fault detection. In addition we use the sensor data to derive compact, higher level information about the environment around the self-driving car that feeds into the Perception and Planning models which in turn dictate the car’s responses.

In this role, you’ll be working closely with other experienced software engineers to develop algorithms that process sensor data and derive information necessary for the vehicle to build a complete understanding of the environment around it. You will be collaborating with other members of the Perception team and downstream consumers of the data to design and implement efficient APIs that make the information available to the rest of the stack. Current projects include:

• Research, design and develop lidar, radar and camera data processing algorithms in C++.
• Design and develop scalable APIs to provide the necessary information to downstream consumers
• Work closely with other members of the Perception and Planning teams to understand data needs.
• Design and implement efficient processing pipelines dealing with large volumes of streaming sensor data. 
• Help deploy and test ML models
• Contribute to evaluation tools and processes

At a minimum, we’d like you to have:

• B.S. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Robotics, or similar technical field of study 
• Strong C/C++ skills
• Experience with Python
• Experience in data structures and algorithms

It’s preferred if you have: 

• Experience in 3D geometry and related algorithms
• Experience with perception algorithms and developing perception systems
• Experience with processing Lidar, Sensor and/or Camera data
• Experience with code optimization on CPUs and GPUs