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.
We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and evolution of the backend systems that power how Waymo will acquire and retain riders.This role sits at the intersection of product engineering and infrastructure: you’ll work closely with cross-functional teams to turn growth ideas into scalable, reusable platforms that serve millions of users and unlock new levers for the business.
Your work will have direct measurable business impact and help millions of customers experience autonomous ride hailing.
You will:- Lead design and implementation of scalable backend systems that support growth mechanics such as incentives, notifications, referrals, and onboarding and more.
- Define and evolve APIs and workflows used by client apps, marketing tools, and internal systems.
- Ensure reliability, observability, and cost-efficiency of high-volume growth services (incentives issuance, campaign redemption, user segmentation).
- Partner cross-functionally with product, apps, data science, and marketing teams to translate growth ideas into reusable backend capabilities.
- Establish reusable frameworks — e.g., rules engines, budget enforcement, and config-driven campaign creation.
- Mentor and influence other engineers — raising the bar for system design, code quality, and operational excellence.
- 7+ years of backend engineering experience (C++, Kotlin, Java, or similar).
- Proven track record building distributed systems, APIs, or backend products at scale.
- Strong fundamentals in data modeling/analytics, concurrency, and reliability.
- Collaborative mindset — you enjoy working with product, mobile, and marketing stakeholders.
- You're a metrics focused engineer with a passion for growth engines — the features, levers, and systems that shape how people discover, experience, and return to the product.
- Hands on experience designing and building data-informed systems — e.g., recommendation engines, growth optimization pipelines, or experimentation frameworks.
- Proven ability to take ambiguous business needs and turn them into stable, extensible technical solutions.
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.
Top Skills
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.
