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.
The Onboard Software Performance team ensures that systems running on our Waymo's meet strict performance requirements such as producing necessary outputs within strict latency targets and using the allocated amount of compute resources (CPU/GPU/TPU/RAM) for each respective submodule. All of this needs to be done at scale with performance guarantees of many 9s of reliability while promoting high velocity of system evolution.
You will:
- Develop ADV's modular architecture improvements and frameworks that maximize performance and compute use and ROI for driving quality
- Evolve our compute usage on the car and simulation to promote continued scaling where the system runs fast on the car and in our data center
- Collaborate with onboard teams to identify and improve compute performance bottlenecks across the stack to improve performance/driving quality
- Collaborate with hardware teams to codesign hardware/software and improve the software for best performance on our hardware platform
- Ensure reaction latency for collision avoidance with and help design novel system/architecture for extremely fast nominal performance
- Develop necessary high scale performance evaluation, debugging and software change management processes
- Improve system resource usage to simulation at scale in Cloud datacenters: minimizing CPU use and latency, minimizing RAM usage, intelligently determining which computations should happen on CPU, GPU, and TPU.
You have:
- BS in Comp Sci, EE, Robotics, Physics, Math, or related field (or equivalent experience)
- 3 years of experience as a software engineer or similar roles
- 3 years of experience in C++
- 3 year of experience optimizing software using profile guided techniques
We prefer:
- 2 years in infrastructure/systems/performance domain optimizing end-to-end systems
- 2 years of experience working on a large-scale/high complexity system (supported by hundreds of engineers)
- Experience in robotics
- Experience in low-level optimization techniques, frameworks (SIMD/CUDA) and ML performance/frameworks
- Experience in evaluation techniques
#LI-Hybrid
This is a hybrid remote/in-office role.
The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is listed below. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the role location or, if the role can be performed remote, the specific salary range for your preferred location, during the hiring process.
Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Physics, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent experience
- 3 years of experience as a software engineer or in a similar role
- 3 years of experience in C++
- 3 years of experience optimizing software using profile-guided techniques
- 2 years of experience in infrastructure, systems, or performance optimization for end-to-end systems
- 2 years of experience working on a large-scale or high-complexity system supported by hundreds of engineers
- Experience in robotics
- Experience with low-level optimization techniques and frameworks such as SIMD and CUDA
- Experience with machine learning performance and frameworks
- Experience with evaluation techniques
Waymo Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Waymo and has not been reviewed or approved by Waymo.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is considered strong for full‑time technical roles, aligning with top‑tier AV/Big Tech benchmarks. Employer materials also emphasize competitive pay with eligibility for bonuses and equity as part of total rewards.
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Healthcare Strength — Coverage spans medical, dental, vision, mental‑health resources, onsite wellness centers, and counseling, with specialized programs such as menopause and transgender medical advocacy. Dependents are included, indicating depth across core health needs.
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Parental & Family Support — Offerings include fertility and family‑forming assistance, parental and baby‑bonding leave, caregiver and elder‑care support, and backup childcare. These programs are positioned to support families through multiple life stages.
Waymo Insights
What We Do
Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to move around. With the Waymo Driver, we can improve the world’s mobility while saving thousands of lives. Waymo reaches out to candidates from official channels only (e.g. directly from @waymo.com email addresses, or through our recruiters or sourcers who are noted as such on LinkedIn). We do not contact candidates about career opportunities through instant messaging apps like Telegram, email addresses from domains other than waymo.com (such as Gmail addresses), direct messages on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, or text messages. Visit waymo.com to check out our official job listings.
