Senior Software Engineer, Quantitative Evaluations

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 Simulator team builds simulations of realistic environments crucial for testing and training the Waymo Driver. We use modern machine learning techniques to model the complexities of the real world, including the behavior of diverse agents (vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists), intricate road networks, dynamic traffic control systems, and varying weather conditions. A core challenge is ensuring our simulations reflect reality. To guide the development of our simulator components, we create metrics and evaluation methodologies to measure realism. These metrics are important for assessing simulator quality, identifying critical sim-to-real gaps, and even serve as loss functions to train realistic simulation models – which, in turn, are fundamental to rigorously evaluating the Waymo Driver's performance and safety.

In this hybrid role you will report to an Engineering Manager.

You will:

• Develop novel methodologies and metrics to measure simulation realism across multiple simulator technologies (e.g., agent behavior, sensor rendering, environmental effects).

• Design scalable and efficient platforms and pipelines for measuring simulation realism across massive datasets.

• Research and implement systems that can guide simulator development priorities.

• Collaborate with world-class engineering and research teams who develop and use large-scale ML models to enhance simulator fidelity.

• Play an important role in a collaborative engineering team dedicated to building a high-fidelity simulator that directly powers the safety validation and performance evaluation of the Waymo Driver.

You have:

• MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 5+ years of industry experience in software development.

• Software Engineering Fundamentals:

• Proficiency in programming in Python or C++, including experience with relevant libraries for data handling and computation (e.g., NumPy, Pandas for Python).

• Experience with SQL for data querying and analysis.

• Experience with software design principles, coding best practices, testing methodologies, and version control software.

• Quantitative Application & Metric Development:

• Identify potential system performance or realism gaps (e.g., from specific examples or initial data exploration) and create data-driven approaches to investigate them.

• Experience designing, implementing, and interpreting quantitative analyses or metrics to systematically evaluate system behavior and validate hypotheses (using concepts such as distributions, confidence intervals, etc.).

• Demonstrated experience taking quantitative findings through to implementation, resulting in productionized metrics, automated evaluation tools, or improvements to validation systems.

• Software Development for Data/Evaluation Pipelines:

• Experience building software pipelines for data processing, system evaluation, or metric computation, in the context of large-scale systems.

We prefer:

• Demonstrated expertise and influence in designing quantitative evaluation methodologies and building scalable data processing/evaluation infrastructure.

• Experience navigating complex technical and product landscapes, defining technical strategy, and creating roadmaps.

• Experience with simulation systems, robotics, or autonomous vehicles.

#LI-Hybrid

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
$204,000—$259,000 USD