Software Quality Operations Specialist

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 enabling safe and successful scale-up into new international markets and incubating mission-critical, high-impact workflows. 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.

In this hybrid role, you will report into our Program Manager.

Why This Team is Essential to Waymo's Success:

Waymo is undergoing unprecedented growth, rapidly expanding into new cities (including international expansion to London and Tokyo) 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:

• International RO & New Market Readiness: Concerted effort to update triage policy, standing Voice of Customer in new countries. Through meticulous triage of driving events, issue discovery, and continuous field monitoring, SWQOps provides early warnings and critical insights to Product and Data Science partners.

• 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 international expansion, quicker remediation of driving issues, and a significant reduction in the engineering effort required to maintain and improve the driver.

• 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.

• Workflow Incubation & Development: Incubating high-impact workflows and ensuring readiness for automation and long-term operational excellence.

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. Provides technical requirements to Engineering for tooling that supports new market workflows (e.g., localization of ML/Gen-AI models, new data pipelines).

• 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. Designs and validates new triage policies, SOPs, and quality control processes specifically for Tokyo driving rules and data signals.

• Act as the Subject Matter Expert for technical policies and guidelines in the new market. Consult with local/international stakeholders to ensure seamless adoption of technical policies.

• 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 8+ years of relevant work experience in AV Software Quality Operations

• Strong understanding of driving rules and regulations in Japan metropolitan areas.

• 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

• Demonstrated experience working with international and/or offshore vendor teams to drive global process standardization and quality

• 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

Travel requirements:

• Y, to HQ, ~10% of all time