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 is a hybrid role and reports to the Head of Planner within the Onboard organization.
You will:
- Lead an SRE team spanning Waymo's Release and Pipeline infrastructure.
- Organize and participate in oncall rotations for how to respond to driving issues in the field.
- 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.
- Partner with organization leads and others across the Onboard, Eval and Simulator organization to improve large-scale software engineering best practices.
- Contribute to system software architecture to help improve its robustness and debuggability.
- If needed: request, hire, and manage additional engineers to contribute to the above responsibilities.
You have:
- Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 10+ years of experience leading large-scale production software systems, especially machine learned systems.
- 5+ years of experience as an organizational leader, managing a group of people and partnering with other organizational leaders.
- 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.
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.
#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
- Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
- 10+ years of experience leading large-scale production software systems, especially machine learning systems
- 5+ years of experience as an organizational leader managing a group of people and partnering with other organizational leaders
- Experience organizing and running on-call rotations
- Excellent influence without authority skills
- Organizational awareness, collaboration, strong communication, and focus on company and team value
- Experience leading hybrid hardware and software production systems
- Experience leading teams working on modern deep machine learning and large-scale models
- Track record of driving change in engineering organizations of 1,000 or more people
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.
