Senior Software Engineer, Configuration & Experiments

Waymo LLC; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 215,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

Equity incentives

Benefits program

Job summary

Waymo LLC in Mountain View, CA, is seeking a senior software engineer to design, implement, and operate backend services delivering configurations to a large autonomous vehicle fleet. You will collaborate across Product, Ops, Data Science, and other teams to scale features safely and roll out updates with reliability.

This role emphasizes large-scale distributed systems, clear documentation of designs, and alignment with company infrastructure such as Borg, Protocol Buffers, and Spanner.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 3+ years of experience with large-scale distributed systems.
• Proven ability to collaborate across organizational boundaries.
• Strong ability to document technical designs and processes clearly.
• Commitment to system safety and reliability in a high-stakes environment.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain backend services delivering configurations to a large real-world fleet.
• Help build and evolve mission-critical commercialization tools and systems.
• Collaborate with Product, Ops, Data Science, and other teams to scale needs.
• Implement robust configuration rollout processes for fleet updates and new markets.
• Enable launching new features safely through evaluation and A/B testing.

Skills

Distributed systems

Software engineering

Cross-functional collaboration

Documentation

System safety

Tools

Protocol Buffers

Spanner

Borg

Job description

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 Configurations team is dedicated to ensuring Waymo's cars drive with the desired features based on the car’s current state (location, driving mode etc). We are also responsible for managing release deployments to our fleet of cars.

The team works with different parts of the company to achieve its mission - other engineering teams to validate and roll out new features, release organization for managing qualifications and deployments, operations for ensuring stability of configurations and validating so that we don’t mistakenly drive with incorrect configurations and so on.

You will:

• Design, implement, and maintain the large-scale backend services that deliver configurations and features to a large, real-world fleet of autonomous vehicles.
• Help build and evolve one or more mission-critical commercialization tools and systems as we scale and serve new markets.
• Collaborate with Product, Ops, Data Science, and other teams to develop systems as our needs grow and evolve
• Implement robust configuration rollout processes to manage the complexity of updating the fleet of Waymo vehicles as we scale up and deploy in new markets.
• Enable launching new features in a safe way - evaluation, A/B testing, gradual rollouts.

You have:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 3+ years of experience working on large-scale distributed systems.
• Proven track record of driving collaboration effectively across organizational boundaries and the ability to partner across organizational boundaries to optimize workflows and drive strategic alignment.
• Strong ability to document technical designs, processes, and communicate clearly with cross-functional teams.
• A commitment to system safety and reliability, with experience in developing mechanisms to detect and prevent the impact of configuration or software failures in a high-stakes environment.

We prefer:

• Interested in interacting with other teams to understand their needs and propose infrastructure solutions.
• Experience with C++.
• Track record of successfully executing forward looking ambitious bets.
• Familiarity with Google infrastructure (e.g. Borg, Protocol Buffers, Spanner).

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.

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

$175,000—$215,000 USD