Senior Software Engineer, Simulation, Vehicle & Autonomous Driving Realism

Waymo; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 204,000 - 259,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary annual bonus

Equity incentive plan

Generous company benefits program

Job summary

A leading autonomous driving technology company in Mountain View is seeking a talented engineer to enhance their simulation capabilities for the Waymo Driver. In this full-time role, you will focus on scaling simulation tools, supporting mapping data development, and improving system reliability. Candidates should have over 5 years of backend experience and strong skills in C++. This position offers a salary range of $204,000—$259,000 USD and eligibility for bonuses and benefits.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building a popular product.
• 5+ years of experience with backend systems including workflows and databases.
• Strong understanding of performance, scalability, and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with engineers to scale simulation for critical milestones.
• Support development and testing of mapping data.
• Monitor and improve the performance and reliability of the simulator.
• Design long-term architecture for product fit with internal customers.

Skills

C++

Database knowledge

Production monitoring

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 Simulator Team at Waymo builds state‑of‑the‑art simulations of realistic environments for testing and training the Waymo Driver. The team is a diverse, and collaborative group of software engineers, machine learning (ML) engineers, and data scientists. We develop industry‑leading simulation solutions that measure and enhance the performance of the Waymo Driver. We achieve those goals by jointly modeling the real world, including self-driving vehicle simulation, realistic agents (vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists), roads, traffic control systems, and weather conditions, and the full sensor suite including camera, Lidar and radars. Waymo's simulation allows the self-driving software to be tested on millions of miles of traffic before they even hit the road. It is crucial to Waymo’s mission of developing the world’s most experienced driver.

The Vehicle and Automated Driving Realism team focuses on building tools and techniques to improve driving realism, which is one of the fundamental attributes of simulation. We ensure that signals we get from simulation reflect real-world driving performance. We care deeply about the performance, reliability, fidelity, and usability of Waymo's simulation.

In this role, you will report to a Senior Staff Engineering Manager.

You will:

• Work closely with onboard and research engineers to scale simulation and enable critical Waymo milestones
• Support development, testing and evolution of mapping data in the simulator
• Improve / monitor the performance, scalability and the reliability of the simulator
• Design the long term architecture to fit the product to an increasing number of internal customers

You have:

• Hands‑on experience building a popular (internal or external‑facing) product
• 5+ years of experience with backend knowledge such as workflows, databases, SQL, production monitoring, etc
• Strong in C++
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We prefer:

• Experience with the release of software in a highly distributed heterogeneous execution environment
• Experience with systems programming (game engines, database, OS, distributed)
• Experience with ML Agent development

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