Staff Software Engineer, TLM, Quantitative Evaluations

San Francisco, CAHybridFull TimeStaff$251,000–$310,000 /yrPosted 1 month agoVisa sponsorship available

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Required skills

C++
Python
software engineering
quantitative evaluations
ML
statistics
algorithms
simulation
code health
data driven decisions

Nice to have

team management
A/B experiment infrastructure
ad-hoc data analysis
SQL
AV industry

Role summary

Waymo is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for its Planner Evaluation team, focusing on measuring and improving autonomous driving software quality. This hybrid role involves leading a team to develop driving quality metrics, analyze sensor and map data, and define long-term strategy. The engineer will leverage ML, statistics, and algorithms, utilize simulation and real-world driving logs, and champion best practices. Collaboration with cross-functional teams is key to delivering evaluation products and driving data-informed decisions. A Master's degree or PhD in a quantitative field and 5+ years of software engineering experience are required, with proficiency in C++ or Python.

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 Planner Evaluation team works on one of the key challenges in autonomous driving: measuring and improving the quality of the software that drives the car. We are looking for experienced data-minded software engineers and data scientists to help us improve how we characterize and evaluate changes to the Onboard software stack (Planner, Perception, etc). If you are passionate about autonomous vehicles and how to use rich, complex data to drive decision making, this is the role for you!

This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to an Engineering Manager.

You will:

Lead and manage a team of software engineers in charge of developing driving quality metrics, measuring the robustness of the Waymo Driver to its input (e.g. sensors data, maps), using a range of techniques including ML, statistics, and algorithms

Define a long-term strategy, develop roadmaps, and guide the team to execute projects from ambiguous requirements to high-impact deliverables

Use simulation creatively and mine real world driving logs to measure driving performance

Champion code health and best practices in a large and complex code base

Collaborate with other engineers, data scientists, statisticians and the leadership team to deliver evaluation products and help make data driven decisions

You have:

Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Statistics, Physics, Math or another quantitative area

5+ years of experience in the field of software engineering

Solid technical leadership in defining vision, strategy and priorities

Proficiency in C++ or Python in a production environment

Strong technical communication and collaboration skills

We prefer:

2+ years of experience in team management

Experience coding in C++

Experience with ML

Experience with A/B experiment infrastructure

Exposure to ad-hoc data analysis with SQL

Experience working in the AV industry

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$251,000—$310,000 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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