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 Simulator Team at Waymo builds state-of-the-art simulations of realistic environments for testing and training the Waymo Driver. We develop industry-leading simulation solutions using advanced ML algorithms that measure and enhance the performance of the Waymo Driver. The Simulator platform is complex and evolving. To ensure that Waymo's Simulation and Evaluation system can scale with new developing Simulation technologies as well as Waymo's growth, this technical leadership role will look across multiple teams and guide strategy for the entire Simulator software stack. This can be everything from low-level optimization up through higher level configuration, all with an eye towards improved utilization across various resources (CPU/RAM/TPU/GPU). You will lead the Simulator Platform's efficiency efforts and represent the team in wider Waymo performance-related efforts.
You will:
- Develop Simulator's architecture improvements and frameworks that maximize performance and compute utilization.
- Evolve compute usage of simulation to enable continued scaling where the system runs efficiently in our data centers.
- Collaborate with evaluation and infrastructure teams to identify and improve compute performance bottlenecks across the stack
- Design, build, and optimize the simulator to enable high throughput and high compute utilization for both single instance simulation and large scale simulations.
- Developing necessary high scale performance evaluation, debugging and software change management processes
- Optimizing system resource usage to simulation at scale: 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)
- Proven track record of setting technical vision, driving multi-quarter roadmaps, and delivering impactful data projects as a technical lead for senior engineering teams, with demonstrated ability to influence across organizational boundaries.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical designs, trade-offs, and strategies to diverse stakeholders, including senior leadership and partner engineering, data scientists, and product teams.
- 6+ years experience on large scale or high complexity system
- Solid software management experience in infrastructure/systems/performance domain optimizing end to end system for high performance metrics
- Extensive experience acting as technical lead in performance/software infrastructure domain
- Proficient 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
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 or master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Physics, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent experience
- 6+ years of experience working on large-scale or highly complex systems
- Proven track record setting technical vision, driving multi-quarter roadmaps, and delivering impactful data projects as a technical lead for senior engineering teams
- Ability to influence across organizational boundaries
- Excellent communication skills for explaining complex technical designs, trade-offs, and strategies to diverse stakeholders
- Software management experience in infrastructure, systems, or performance optimization
- Extensive experience as a technical lead in performance or software infrastructure
- Proficiency in C++
- Ability to define project portfolios and roadmaps optimized for overall results
- Ability to establish collaboration structures across team boundaries
- 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 large-scale evaluation techniques, data science, performance metrics, and tooling
- Experience with large-scale software re-architecture projects
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.
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