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.
As the Pipeline SRE Lead, you will play a key role in driving the reliability of our most critical release pipelines.
You’ll lead the strategy and execution for observability, incident management, capacity planning, and continuous improvement of our production systems. You will be accountable for the response to novel, rare, or unexpected events encountered during our software release process. This includes both spearheading timely investigations and resolutions, as well as proactively partnering with engineering to evolve our software system to enhance their robustness and adaptability.
This unique role encompasses planet scale software delivery systems which underpin our rapidly growing and evolving fleet of autonomous vehicles operating in multiple cities. The challenges of ensuring reliability at our scale and pace is unprecedented. If you are a hands-on SRE lead, with strong software engineering skills, who is passionate about solving first-of-their-kind problems with significant real-world impact, we'd like to meet you.
This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to the Head of Planner within the Onboard organization.
You will:
- Drive incident response processes, retrospectives, and continuous improvement to prevent recurring issues. Organize and participate in on call rotations for release oriented outages, along with disaster recovery planning and business continuity
- Harden software, develop playbooks, improve oncall metrics and post-mitigation workstreams, and improve robustness of the software system running our most critical release processes
- Lead the engineering analysis and response to novel, rare or unexpected events encountered during our development analysis cycle.
- Champion a culture of reliability engineering across the organization, including partnering with organization leads and others across the Onboard, Eval and Simulator organization to educate and improve large-scale software engineering best practices.
- Contribute to system software architecture to help improve its robustness and debuggability
You have:
- Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
- 10+ years of experience working on large-scale production software systems, especially machine learned systems
- 10+ years on hands on coding experience with C++
- Experience organizing and running oncall rotations
- Excellent influence without authority skills
- Organizational awareness, extremely collaborative, strong communication, focus on value add to the company and to the team
- Deep expertise in architecting large scale distributred systems, observability tools, monitoring systems, and incident management practices
- Strong background in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and production operations at scale
- Proficiency with automation, infrastructure and modern DevOps/SRE tooling
- Track record of improving system reliability through data-driven approaches and systematic problem-solving
We prefer:
- Experience leading hybrid hardware/software production systems
- Experience leading teams who work on modern deep ML / large scale models
- Track record of bringing about change in 1000+ person engineering organizations
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
- Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
- 10+ years of experience working on large-scale production software systems, especially machine-learned systems
- 10+ years of hands-on coding experience with C++
- Experience organizing and running on-call rotations
- Excellent influence without authority skills
- Strong organizational awareness, collaboration, communication, and value-focused teamwork
- Deep expertise architecting large-scale distributed systems, observability tools, monitoring systems, and incident management practices
- Strong background in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and production operations at scale
- Proficiency with automation, infrastructure, and modern DevOps/SRE tooling
- Track record of improving system reliability through data-driven approaches and systematic problem-solving
- Experience leading hybrid hardware/software production systems
- Experience leading teams working on modern deep machine learning or large-scale models
- Track record of driving change in 1,000+ person engineering organizations
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.
