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.
Our mission within the Driver Understanding and Evaluation (DUE) team at Waymo is to develop rich metrics for understanding the behavior of the Waymo Driver in the real world.
In this hybrid role, you will report to a Software Engineering Manager.
You will:
- Build the infrastructure to administer a "virtual driver's test" for the Waymo Driver. Design, implement, and operate scalable simulation data pipelines to evaluate the driving capability of the Waymo Driver.
- Improve the signal quality provided by the "virtual driver's test". Improve the quality of individual simulations and that of the overarching simulation workflows. Try to answer whether the results of the "virtual driver's test" are predictive of the Waymo Driver's real-world driving behavior.
- Apply ML models from partner teams, and optionally contribute to them yourself, to improve the efficiency of our "virtual driver's test": simulate the most interesting situations and report the most interesting simulation results.
You have:
- 5+ years of full-time software engineering experience, or a quantitative PhD with 2+ years of professional software engineering experience
- C++ proficiency
- Python familiarity
- SQL familiarity
- Excited about autonomous driving, Simulation + Eval
We prefer:
- 7+ years of industry experience or 3+ years post-doc experience in a quantitative- or quality- focused engineering role in which you had experience as a technical lead for a team in which you were performing tasks like developing hypotheses, designing and running experiments, processing data from experiments, synthesizing conclusions, and ensuring the long term stability and health of the production system.
- B.Sc. in Computer Science
- Experience working with large FAANG scale distributed systems.
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
- 5+ years of full-time software engineering experience or a quantitative PhD with 2+ years of professional software engineering experience
- C++ proficiency
- Python familiarity
- SQL familiarity
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.
