Senior Staff Android Engineer, In-Car Experience

Overview

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, enabling over 100 million miles of autonomous driving on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

About the Role

You will report to an Engineering Director and set the overarching technical architecture for the in-car experience (ICX), bridging the gap between the different layers of the stack, from low-level hardware bring-up to our OS to rider-facing apps and features. You will identify broad, cross-team bottlenecks and translate them into clear, actionable engineering milestones for the teams to execute on that improve both velocity and stability. You will steer the technical integration of complex, high-impact features and act as a force multiplier for the organization by establishing high standards for code health, system reliability, and testing excellence, while providing deep technical mentorship to junior and senior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Set the overarching technical architecture for the in-car experience (ICX)
• Bridge the gap between different layers of the stack, from low-level hardware bring-up to our OS to rider-facing apps and features
• Identify and address broad, cross-team bottlenecks
• Translate identified bottlenecks into clear, actionable engineering milestones for the teams to execute on
• Steer the technical integration of complex, high-impact features
• Act as a force multiplier for the organization by establishing high standards for code health, system reliability, and testing excellence
• Provide deep technical mentorship to junior and senior engineers
• Make significant individual contributions in both design and code to ensure we can land the technically challenging work needed for this space to succeed

Requirements

• Proven experience as a technical lead with a track record of setting strategic technical direction and delivering concrete solutions for complex, multi-team domains
• Experience working with Android/AOSP (building Android platform features, frameworks), not just developing apps on top of Android
• Deep expertise spanning the modern application and embedded stack, specifically involving Android OS internals, C++ native layers, and modern UI frameworks (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose), as well as complementary backend systems
• Strong system design skills with a demonstrated ability to decouple monolithic architectures, build reusable platform infrastructure, and optimize resource-constrained environments
• Exceptional communication and cross-functional leadership skills, capable of influencing without direct authority to build alignment across Product, UX, Systems Engineering, and Hardware teams
• AI-native mindset with a proven track record of deploying agent systems to improve team velocity

Preferred

• Familiarity with automotive context with Android
• Experience establishing frameworks for third-party experiences
• Experience integrating new hardware features into an extensible framework for 1P and 3P usage

Benefits

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.

Schedule

This is a full-time position.

Pay

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.

$298,000—$368,000 USD