Waymo Verified

Autonomous Vehicles, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Automotive

Sr. Staff Systems Engineer, Perception-Planner Risk

Mountain View, CAHybridFull TimeStaff$272,000–$336,000 /yrPosted 7 days agoVisa sponsorship available

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Required skills

quantitative safety risk analysis
sensor suites
pedestrian crowds
degraded sensing
construction zones
perception hardware
perception software
V&V test outcomes
operational design domains
emergent challenges

Nice to have

thesis
machine learning
statistics
robotics
autonomy driving industry experience
model-driven metrics

Role summary

Waymo is seeking a Sr. Staff Systems Engineer, Perception-Planner Risk to define and implement quantitative safety risk analysis for autonomous vehicle systems. This role involves developing sophisticated statistical models and methods to evaluate end-to-end performance, particularly for rare or data-scarce events. You will analyze system requirements, support architectural trade studies, and improve the rigor and efficiency of risk assessment. Collaboration with onboard software, test engineering, systems safety, product, simulation, and data science teams is crucial. The ideal candidate has a Bachelor's or higher degree in a quantitative field, 10+ years of engineering experience, and deep technical knowledge in areas like ML, quantitative risk estimation, or systems engineering fundamentals. Experience in vehicular robotics and safety-critical applications is essential.

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 Systems Engineering team works together to blend software and hardware systems in groundbreaking new ways. We set the high performance standards that ensure our vehicles run smoothly and keep passengers safe, then design and perform the tests that validate that performance. We're looking for talented teammates who’ll help us maintain strong teamwork and are passionate about driving results.

You will:

Define the approach for quantitative safety risk analysis across sensing and perception systems engineering, building on top of Waymo-wide risk assessment and management methodologies. You will design, develop, and implement sophisticated quantitative methods and statistical models for evaluating end-to-end performance for current and counterfactual sensor suites.

Apply the defined approach for selected events that occur rarely or have scarce operational data. The generalized goal is to assess behavioral safety risk across a wide variety of situations like interacting with pedestrian crowds, navigating around floods, and degraded sensing in construction zones.

Develop and prototype novel workflows to:

Analyze to determine the required performance levels of various sensing and perception tasks

Support trade studies to inform architectural decisions for perception hardware or software

Estimate exposure of events relevant to perception-driven behavioral risk

Improve quantitative rigor, standardization, efficiency of execution, and reporting of end-to-end risk from V&V test outcomes in complex contexts.

Expand existing methodologies that are crucial for breaking into new operational design domains and addressing emergent challenges

Collaborate closely with:

Onboard Software and Evaluation for mapping perception evaluation and planner evaluation to end-to-end risk in large models

Test Engineering for cross-calibrating risk from V&V results across various methodologies and coverage competencies, and providing actionable data to improve Waymo’s test tooling across public roads/closed course tests and simulations on logged/synthetic scenarios

Systems Safety for appropriate allocation of quantitative risk across functional insufficiencies

Clearly communicate complex quantitative findings and recommendations to diverse stakeholders, including senior leadership, to enable safety at scale. You will collaborate deeply within SysEng and cross-functionally with Product, Simulation, and Data science teams to advance safely and deliver excellence.

You have:

Bachelors or higher degree in computer science, math, physics, engineering, or a related field

10+ years of engineering experience with demonstrated delivery of high-stakes technical roadmaps that successfully resolved architectural friction and deployed business-critical systems

Experience using AI productivity tools for analysis and workflow development

Proficiency and experience in:

Vehicular robotics (development or evaluation)

Software development (Python or C++)

Statistical or predictive modeling

Experimental design and developing metrics for quantitative methods

Deep technical knowledge of at least two of:

State of the art ML techniques that power modern perception systems and large end-to-end models

Quantitative risk estimation using simulators, preferably with sensors-in-loop

Systems engineering fundamentals such as requirements definition, formal verification and validation methods

Track record of leading complex projects in safety critical applications with leadership-facing accountability across software, operations, data science, product, and testing

Excellent verbal and written communication skills, and ability to manage by influence

We prefer:

Masters (with thesis) or PhD in machine learning, statistics, robotics, or a related quantitative field

Autonomy driving industry experience

Experience testing on large-scale infrastructure and deploying production-level safety critical systems

Track record of developing model-driven metrics that influence software or hardware design decisions at scale

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$272,000—$336,000 USD

Sample Waymo interview questions

1
Design a data ingestion system
system designmedium
2
Design a simulation-based regression detection system for code changes
system designhard
3
Longest Substring with Two Distinct Characters Find the longest substring with at most two distinct characters. Input: s = "ccaabbb" Output: 5 Explanation: The substring "aabbb" contains exactly two distinct characters and has a maximum length of 5.
codingmedium
4
Alien Dictionary Order Derive the alien dictionary order from a sorted list of alien words. Input: words = ["z","x","z"] Output: "" (Empty String) Explanation: The letter 'z' cannot come before 'x' and then suddenly after 'x', creating a cycle and making the dictionary invalid.
codingmedium
5
Palindrome After Deleting One Character Determine if a string can be a palindrome after deleting at most one character. Input: s = "abc" Output: FALSE Explanation: Deleting any single character leaves either "ab", "bc", or "ac", none of which result in a valid palindrome.
codingmedium

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