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.
Onboard Software Performance team ensures that systems running on ADV (Autonomously Driven Vehicle) meet strict performance requirements such as producing necessary outputs within strict latency targets and using an appropriately allocated amount of compute resources (CPU/GPU/TPU/RAM etc) for each respective submodule. All of this needs to be done at scale with performance guarantees of many 9s of reliability while enabling high velocity of system evolution.
In this hybrid role, you will report to a Senior Staff Engineer, Technical Lead Manager.
You will:
- Develop ADV's modular architecture improvements and frameworks that maximize performance and compute utilization and ROI for driving quality
- Evolve our compute usage on the car and simulation to enable continued scaling where the system runs fast on the car and efficiently in our data center
- Collaborating with onboard teams to identify and improve compute performance bottlenecks across the stack to improve performance/driving quality
- Collaborating with hardware teams to codesign hardware/software and optimize the software for best performance on our hardware platform
- Ensuring our performance is strong at any driving complexity including as we scale to even more complex driving environments and encounter rarer events
- Ensuring state of the art reaction latency for collision avoidance via novel system/architecture designs and extremely fast nominal performance
- Developing necessary high scale performance evaluation, debugging and software change management processes
- Optimizing system resource usage to simulation at scale in Cloud datacenters: minimizing CPU utilization and latency, minimizing RAM consumption, intelligently determining which computations should happen on CPU, GPU, and TPU.
You have:
- BS/MS in Comp Sci, EE, Robotics, Physics, Math, or related field (or equivalent experience)
- 6 years of software engineering experience on large scale/high complexity system (supported by hundreds of engineers)
- 2 years of software management experience with at least 4 years in infrastructure/systems/performance domain optimizing end to end system for high performance metrics
- 4 years of experience acting as technical lead in performance/software infrastructure domain
- 4 years of experience in C++
- Define roadmap/portfolio of projects optimizing for end results overall across all aspects of the problem space
- Setup collaboration structures across team boundaries
We prefer:
- Experience in robotics
- Experience in low level optimization techniques, frameworks (SIMD/CUDA) and ML performance/frameworks
- Experience in large scale evaluation techniques/data science and building performance metrics/tooling
- Experience in large scale software re-architecture projects
#LI-Hybrid
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
- 6 years of software engineering experience
- 2 years of software management experience
- 4 years of experience in C++
- 4 years of experience acting as technical lead in performance/software domain
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.
