Tech Lead Manager, Backend

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.

Want to build the next generation of infrastructure for driverless cars?

Join our Waymo Commercialization team, and help us design the future of transportation! We are looking for a passionate Tech Lead Manager who wants to help build the systems that improve Waymo's core ride hailing and fleet management systems.

You are someone who and product-minded. You will work on cross-cutting problems to require cross-team collaboration, both technically (mobile app, cloud backends, and the Waymo Driver) and functionally (operations, product, legal, partnerships, policy & privacy) to develop and deliver business critical infrastructure.

In this hybrid role, you will report to an Staff Software Engineer.

You will:

• Technical Leadership & Strategy: Define the roadmap for high-performance, low-latency pipelines that bridge massive-scale simulation with real-world monitoring.

• Team Management & Mentorship: Grow and develop a team of engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, code health, and continuous learning.

• Evaluation & Fidelity Oversight: Drive the scientific rigor behind our "virtual driver’s test," ensuring simulation signals are highly predictive of real-world behavior.

• ML & Innovation: Lead the integration of advanced ML models to identify high-value driving scenarios, optimizing testing efficiency through large-scale model deployment.

• Operational Excellence: Ensure the long-term stability and health of production systems while championing developer experience and best-in-class software practices.

• Cross-Functional Influence: Partner with Data Science and Systems Engineering leads to translate complex vehicle telemetry into high-level strategic insights.

You have:

• 5+ years of full-time software engineering experience (or a quantitative PhD with 2+ years of professional SWE experience).

• Experience managing small teams

• Advanced command of C++ (or another OOP language) with functional familiarity in Python and SQL.

• A deep interest in autonomous driving, simulation-based evaluation, and large-scale data systems.

• Excited about autonomous driving, Simulation + Eval

• Strong verbal and written communication skills

We prefer:

• 7+ years of industry experience or 3+ years post-doc experience in a quantitative- or quality- focused engineering role in which you had experience as a technical lead for a team in which you were performing tasks like developing hypotheses, designing and running experiments, processing data from experiments, synthesizing conclusions, and ensuring the long term stability and health of the production system.

• B.Sc., M.Sc. or PhD in Computer Science

• Experience working with large FAANG scale distributed systems.