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Autonomous Vehicles, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Automotive

Software Quality Operations Specialist

Mountain View, San FranciscoRemoteFull Time$130,000–$160,000 /yrPosted 6 days ago

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Role summary

Waymo is seeking a Software Quality Operations Specialist for a full-time hybrid role. The position involves reporting to a Senior Research Scientist and contributing to software quality operations. The expected base salary range is $130,000 - $160,000 USD annually, with potential for bonuses and equity. Benefits are also provided.

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.

The Software Quality Operations (SWQOps) team is at the heart of ensuring the safety, reliability, and quality of the Waymo Driver. Our mission is to build an adaptable and scalable operation, increasingly powered by AI, to deliver the crucial insights necessary to confidently deploy and grow Waymo's autonomous vehicle service.

Why This Team is Essential to Waymo's Success:

Waymo is undergoing unprecedented growth, rapidly expanding into new cities (targeting ~20 new cities by EOY 2026) and launching new vehicle platforms. SWQOps, especially our Technical Specialists, plays a critical role in this expansion, making it possible to scale safely and efficiently. We are on the front lines of:

  • Supporting the development of a single, automated, end-to-end machine learning flywheel for the entire Waymo Driver. A successful flywheel will be the core engine for scaling our technology, enabling faster ODD expansion, quicker remediation of driving issues, and a significant reduction in the engineering effort required to maintain and improve the driver.
  • De-risking New Deployments: Through meticulous triage of driving events, issue discovery, and continuous field monitoring, SWQOps provides early warnings and critical insights. This "early intervention in RO issue detection" ensures operational resilience and safety, particularly in new and complex environments, which is critical as Waymo enters multiple new cities and ramps up platforms like W12.
  • Enabling Market Expansion: Our team is deeply integrated into every stage of Waymo's market entry framework, from initial city evaluation (OK2Plan) to scaling operations (OK2Scale). We provide the necessary data analysis, policy development, and quality assurance to unblock critical milestones, preventing slowdowns in market expansion velocity.
  • Driving Engineering Velocity: By handling the vital work of performance evaluation, issue deep-dives, and data set curation, SWQOps collaborates heavily and allows Waymo's Engineering, SysEng, Simulation, and Data Science teams to focus on their core tasks of developing and improving the Waymo Driver.

    • You will:

  • Partner with Engineering to design, test, and deploy cutting-edge Machine Learning (ML) and Generative AI (Gen-AI) models and tools to drive step-change improvements in issue discovery & detection, triage efficiency, and quality assurance.
  • Leverage AI-powered insights and traditional triage signals to proactively identify emerging on-road issue trends, new risk scenarios, and edge cases. Develop and refine data-driven strategies for issue discovery and monitoring, enhanced by ML model outputs
  • Serve as the key link between AI/ML development and operational execution. Define and document new policies, guidelines, and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that integrate AI tools and insights into daily vendor workflows.
  • Design and implement robust quality control processes for both human and AI-generated outputs. Perform meta-quality checks, validate the integrity of vendor work, and provide feedback to improve both human and model performance.
  • Act as the subject matter expert for our Software Quality Operations, working closely with stakeholders, program leads, and vendor teams to ensure seamless adoption and maximum impact of AI/ML advancements in our quality processes. Be the trusted source for creating and updating technical policies, guidelines, and standard operating procedures for new scopes, platforms, and driving signals
  • Provide technical leadership and consultation to stakeholders to enhance our workflows and quality. You'll be at the forefront of identifying and escalating issues with our tools, providing technical requirements to engineering, and driving user testing to support the development and deployment of new tooling features.

    • You have:

  • BS/BA degree or 4 years of relevant work experience in AV Software Quality Operations
  • Increased competency in supporting all phases of the machine learning development lifecycle, from data preparation and training to validation, deployment, and continuous monitoring.
  • Experience with ML testing and validation, including dataset quality assurance, bias detection, edge-case scenario testing, and performance evaluation using statistical metrics.
  • Ability to quickly learn and implement new concepts and utilize proprietary tools. Strong understanding of driving rules and regulations.
  • A proven ability to work in a fast-paced, high-stress environment while maintaining good judgment
  • Excellent communication and interpersonal skills to effectively collaborate with a wide range of individuals in a diverse and dynamic work environment

    • We prefer:

  • Demonstrated strong execution with ability to drive outcomes
  • Experience working with offshore teams / multiple local operations hubs
  • Basic SQL querying
  • Competency in LLM / transformer models, and / or ML for robotics domain experience
  • A greater focus on using your subject matter expertise for results analysis and direct customer consultation in the development of new and improved solutions
  • Self-motivated with basic skills in task planning and time management

    • In accordance with Washington state law, we are highlighting our comprehensive benefits package, which is available to all eligible US based employees. Benefits for this role include:

  • Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance
  • Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match
  • Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment
  • Sick Time: 40 hours/year (statutory, where applicable); 5 days/event (discretionary)
  • Maternity Leave (Short-Term Disability + Baby Bonding): 28-30 weeks
  • Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks
  • Holidays: 13 paid days per year

    • 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
    $130,000—$160,000 USD

    Sample Waymo interview questions

    • 1

      Design a data ingestion system

      system designmedium
    • 2

      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
    • 3

      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
    • 4

      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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