Senior Software Engineer, Eval Efficiency & Optimization

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• Solve ill-defined problems at the intersection of statistics, machine learning, and scalable systems engineering.
• Develop creative quantitative models to address eval challenges, while providing rigorous mathematical and experimental proof of the correctness and statistical efficiency of your solutions.
• Tackle ill-defined, ambiguous problems and reduce complex systems into tractable quantitative models.
• Develop statistical techniques that enable our evaluation pipelines to deliver better signals with fewer resources.
• Design and build automation to enhance the efficiency and scalability of our evaluation infrastructure.
• Collaborate with other engineers, data scientists, product managers, and the leadership team to deliver evaluation products and help make data driven decisions.
• Champion code health and best practices in a large and complex code base.

Requirements

• BS in Math, Physics, or another quantitative field.
• Fluency in implementing statistical, ML, and general mathematical algorithms for large datasets.
• Experience adapting techniques in research papers to applied problems.
• Strong self-motivation and comfort with ambiguity to navigate complex systems and pursue open-ended problems to completion.
• 3-5 years of 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.

Qualifications

• PhD in a quantitative field (preferred).
• Experience programming in C++ and Python.
• Experience developing, evaluating, and deploying products at scale.
• Experience with Agentic AI.

Benefits

• Discretionary annual bonus program.
• Equity incentive plan.
• Generous Company benefits program (subject to eligibility requirements).

Pay

Salary Range $213,000—$263,000 USD.