Staff Software Engineer, Quantitative Evaluation

Staff Software Engineer, Quantitative Evaluation

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 Planner Evaluation team works on one of the key challenges in autonomous driving: measuring and improving the quality of the software that drives the car. We are looking for experienced data-minded software engineers and data scientists to help us improve how we characterize and evaluate changes to the Onboard software stack (Planner, Perception, etc). If you are passionate about autonomous vehicles and how to use rich, complex data to drive decision making, this is the role for you!

In this hybrid role, you will report to an Engineering Manager.

You will:

• Develop signals to measure the performance and driving qualities of the Waymo driver, using a range of techniques including statistics, math, physics, algorithms and machine learning.
• Use simulation creatively and mine real world driving logs to measure driving performance.
• Design and implement methods to make a stronger connection between onboard software changes and simulated outcomes.
• Champion code health and best practices in a large and complex code base.
• Analyze data and make recommendations on how to improve metric quality and interpretability.
• Collaborate with other engineers, data scientists, statisticians and the leadership team to deliver evaluation products and help make data driven decisions.
• Quickly prove out the efficacy of added coverage, and strive to hand off solutions in a robust way for customer teams to own their own evaluation.

You have:

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Robotics, Statistics, Physics, Math or another quantitative area
• Strong self-motivation to navigate complex systems and pursue open-ended problems to completion
• Willingness to move quickly between verticals for different internal customers. Work is more likely to be short projects rather than protected 6+ month efforts.
• 5+ years of industry experience with:
• Navigating and modifying a large code base containing a variety of languages, such as C++, Python and SQL
• Performing statistical analyses
• Building data processing pipelines
• Writing, reviewing, and merging code following industry standards for code health and maintainability
• Quant/data fluency is a top requirement

We prefer:

• Experience coding in C++
• Experience with ML
• Experience with A/B experiment infrastructure
• Experience building and validating metrics to measure quality in complex systems
• Exposure to ad-hoc data analysis tools for rapid modeling and prototyping
• Experience working in the AV industry

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.

Salary Range $251,000—$310,000 USD