Staff Software Engineer, Data-Driven Behaviors

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 Reasoning Team builds technology that has an extremely broad impact across the Waymo organization and is the team most directly responsible for the Waymo Driver’s behavior. We are the software engineering team responsible for Waymo's high-level motion planning, encoding Waymo's desired driving behaviors onboard and offboard. Our mission is to build the driving logic needed to deliver a safe, excellent Waymo Driver at scale. We have wide reaching impact into both onboard and off-board system architecture, paving the way for future-looking deep-learning-based explorations. In this team, you'll have an impact on scaling our Waymo Driver's performance and maintaining and improving our excellent safety record as Waymo expands to more cities. 

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

You will: 

• Lead and develop the data pipelines that power ML solutions for the Waymo driver's decision making and motion planning: spanning data mining from large datasets, refining labeling policies, and shaping the reward or loss functions for ML models


• Quickly prototype ideas to improve data pipelines and conduct model finetuning


• Integrate and deploy ML models on the fleet, conducting end-to-end validation and enabling on-field monitoring


• Collaborate closely with partner teams such as perception, research, simulation, and evaluation


• Mentor engineers in leading adoption of data-primary approaches for solving reasoning problems

You have: 

• Experience in applied machine learning: data shaping, feature engineering, loss/reward shaping, finetuning and model evaluation


• Eval experience: contributing to scalable eval workflows and building metrics for ML models


• Proficiency in dealing with large scale models and datasets. High quality API design with an eye towards eval and data-driven techniques.


• Experience with working and solving design problems that cut across multiple components.


• PhD, Masters or Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field.

We prefer: 

• Experience with Large Language Models (LLM), Vision Language Models (VLM), deep learning or reinforcement learning. 


• Experience in the autonomous driving domain, including areas like motion planning or perception


• Proficiency in C++, Python, and SQL

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