Software Engineer, Simulation for Release Validation

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the 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 One, a fully autonomous ride-hailing service, and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over one million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving tens of millions of miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 13+ U.S. states.

Software Engineering builds the brains of Waymo's fully autonomous driving technology. Our software allows the Waymo Driver to perceive the world around it, make the right decision for every situation, and deliver people safely to their destinations. We think deeply and solve complex technical challenges in areas like robotics, perception, decision-making, and deep learning, while collaborating with hardware and systems engineers. If you're a software engineer or researcher who's curious and passionate about Level 4 autonomous driving, we'd like to meet you.

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 in order to evaluate the driving capability of the Waymo Driver.
• Improve the signal quality provided by the "virtual driver's test". Measure and improve the quality of individual simulations as well as that of the overarching simulation workflows. Seek 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.
• Apply software engineering best practices in order to improve code health and developer experience in the "virtual driver's test" development ecosystem.
• Partner with cross-functional teams including Data Science and Systems Engineering who will help with number crunching and expert understanding of the Waymo Driver internals.

You have:

• 2 years of full-time software engineering experience, or a quantitative PhD with at least 6 months of professional software engineering experience
• C++ basic competency
• Python basic competency
• SQL basic competency
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Excited about autonomous driving, Simulation + Eval

We prefer:

• 1 year of industry or post-doc experience in a quantitative- or quality-focused engineering role in which you had experience with developing hypotheses, designing and running experiments, processing data from experiments, synthesizing conclusions.
• B.Sc. in Computer Science
• Experience working with large FAANG scale distributed systems.

#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.

Salary Range: $158,000 — $200,000 USD