Silicon Emulation Engineer

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.

Waymo's Compute Team is tasked with a critical and exciting mission: delivering the compute platform responsible for running the fully autonomous vehicle’s software stack. To achieve this mission, the team architects and creates high-performance custom silicon, develops system-level compute architectures that push the boundaries of performance, power, and latency, and collaborates closely with other teams to optimize hardware and software for maximum performance. This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to a Silicon Engineering Lead.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the Design, Verification, and Software teams to simulate future silicon designs and software on an emulation platform, targeting functional and performance validation and left-shift of software development.
• Design, implement, and optimize emulation testbenches, balancing performance and debug capabilities based on user needs and hardware constraints.
• Write end-to-end synthesizable transactors to interact with emulated designs through software APIs and C-DPI.
• Triage and root-cause failures alongside emulation users, leveraging waveforms, software logging, and custom-built emulation monitors.
• Assist with post-silicon bring-up, debug, and characterization.
• Build infrastructure to support the emulation user base, including tools for model build, regression, automation, continuous integration, data analysis, and training.

Requirements

• BS degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field and 5 years of silicon development experience.
• Experience with at least one major hardware emulation platform (Palladium, Zebu, Veloce, Protium, HAPS).
• High level of proficiency with one or more of the following emulation approaches: virtual prototyping, testbench acceleration, hybrid emulation, in-circuit emulation (speed bridge), QEMU, or VirtualBox.
• Experience with SystemVerilog and design verification methodologies.
• Programming and scripting (C++, Python, or TCL) for automation, test development, debug flows, and release processes.
• Strong debug and problem-solving ability across hardware and software.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AXI/AMBA, PCIe, DRAM, and Ethernet interfaces.
• Performance and power analysis techniques.
• Experience with JTAG, DFT, UART, SPI, GPIO, and other test/low-speed interfaces.
• Knowledge of advanced design verification methods (coverage, gate-level simulation, assertions, and UVM).
• Post-silicon debug software (e.g., Trace32, OpenOCD, TARMAC) and lab bench tools (analyzers, scopes, meters).
• Understanding of bare metal programming, embedded systems, Linux internals, operating systems, boot loaders, drivers, and firmware.

Pay

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is $175,000—$215,000 USD. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. 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.