Field Safety Engineer

Mountain View, CAHybridFull Time$170,000–$210,000 /yrPosted 25 days agoVisa sponsorship available

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Required skills

Mechanical Engineering
Aerospace Engineering
Electrical Engineering
data analysis
system modeling
simulation
Python
C++
autonomous vehicle safety
physical system modeling

Nice to have

autonomy
machine learning
statistical data analysis
quantitative risk assessment
reliability engineering
large-scale datasets

Role summary

Waymo is seeking a Field Safety Engineer to enhance the safety of its autonomous driving technology. This role involves analyzing field data from events and issues, designing and building offboard field monitors using AI tools, and contributing to safety strategies. The ideal candidate will have a Ph.D. in a relevant technical field, hands-on software development experience for data analysis, system modeling, or simulation, and a solid understanding of autonomous vehicle safety principles. Experience with Python or C++ for data analysis tools is essential. Preferred qualifications include experience in autonomy or machine learning, statistical data analysis, quantitative risk assessment, reliability engineering, and working with large datasets or SQL.

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 Waymo Safety team works to promote and help to continuously improve the safety of Waymo's fully autonomous driving technology. Our experts develop safety goals and strategies, and conduct safety engineering analyses to ensure safety is being considered throughout the design and development of our vehicles. The team develops and promotes safety strategies and policies for autonomous vehicles for its work with regulatory authorities, lawmakers, law enforcement and public and non-profit organizations.

In this role you will help build Waymo’s offboard Field Safety monitoring capabilities, which help to ensure the continued safety of Waymo’s vehicles as we expand our operations. As part of Waymo’s Field Safety team, you will be involved in the analysis of events and issues affecting Waymo’s autonomous vehicles. Inspired by these real-world issues, you will design and build proactive, offboard field monitors, making use of Waymo's latest available AI tools. You will receive direct mentorship from Waymo's Field Safety Architect and other safety leaders to transition cutting-edge academic theory into real-world autonomous fleet safety at scale.

This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to the Senior Director, Safety.

You will:

Participate in investigations into driverless events, employee safety concerns, and other potential issues that could pose risks to the safety of Waymo vehicles, analyzing field data to identify trends.

Identify opportunities for further offboard field monitoring, then design and build your own monitors, making use of Waymo's latest available AI tools.

You have:

Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field. This role does not require post-doctoral work experience, and recent Ph.D. graduates are highly encouraged to apply.

Hands-on experience developing software for data analysis, system modeling, or simulation. Demonstrated ability to independently write clean, maintainable, and well-documented code (e.g., Python, C++) to build reusable data analysis tools that anticipate the next technical question.

Solid grasp of one (and, ideally, multiple) fundamental areas relevant to autonomous vehicle safety including physical system modeling, control theory, vehicle dynamics, sensing, perception, planning, behavior prediction, and machine learning.

A natural curiosity to explore novel ways of leveraging data to rapidly answer safety questions arising from field events.

Eagerness to network internally and build relationships across diverse engineering teams to trace issues and collect data.

Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

We prefer:

Software experience in autonomy or machine learning.

Familiarity with statistical data analysis, quantitative risk assessment, or reliability engineering.

Experience working with large-scale datasets, database querying (SQL-like), or building interactive offboard data dashboards.

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$170,000—$210,000 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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