Senior Staff Android Engineer, In-Car Experience

Waymo; Mountain View (CA); Hybrid; USD 298,000 - 368,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary annual bonus

Equity incentive plan

Generous company benefits program

Job summary

Waymo is seeking a Technical Lead to establish the architectural vision for our in-car experience. In this hybrid role, you will oversee the integration of complex features and mentor engineers.

The ideal candidate has proven leadership experience, deep Android expertise, and strong system design skills. The position offers a competitive salary range of $298,000—$368,000 and benefits including bonuses and equity incentives.

Qualifications

• Proven experience as a technical lead with a track record of delivering solutions.
• Deep expertise in Android OS internals and modern UI frameworks.
• Exceptional communication and influence skills across teams.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical architecture and vision across the entire in-car experience.
• Steer the technical integration of complex features like AI and in-car apps.
• Act as a technical mentor, ensuring high code and system standards.

Skills

Technical leadership

Android/AOSP expertise

System design skills

Cross-functional leadership

AI-native mindset

Tools

Kotlin

C++

Jetpack Compose

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.

We are building a team of engineers dedicated to further developing our in‑car experience. Projects include the Pick Ups and Drop Offs (PUDO) experience, and Infotainment during passenger trips (music, games, maps). Our team works on the user interfaces used by customers to hail and control our autonomous vehicles. We build complex user experiences, phone‑to‑vehicle communications, and solve novel human‑computer interaction problems in the AV space.

In this hybrid role, you will report to an Engineering Director.

Responsibilities

• Set the overarching technical architecture, defining a multi‑year technical vision across the entire in‑car experience (ICX), bridging the gap between the different layers of the stack, from low‑level hardware bring‑up to our OS to rider‑facing apps and features.
• Identify broad, cross‑team bottlenecks (e.g., OS stability, rendering performance, release automation), and translate them into clear, actionable engineering milestones for the teams to execute on that improve both velocity and stability.
• Steer the technical integration of complex, high‑impact features, such as our 3D car view, AI features, and in‑car app ecosystem.
• Act as a force multiplier for the organization by establishing high standards for code health, system reliability, and testing excellence, while providing deep technical mentorship to junior and senior engineers.
• Make significant individual contributions in both design and code to ensure we can land the technically challenging work needed for this space to succeed, from implementing large changes to investigating tricky bugs.

Qualifications

• Proven experience as a technical lead with a track record of setting strategic technical direction and delivering concrete solutions for complex, multi‑team domains.
• Experience working with Android/AOSP (building Android platform features, frameworks), not just developing apps on top of Android.
• Deep expertise spanning the modern application and embedded stack, specifically involving Android OS internals, C++ native layers, and modern UI frameworks (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose), as well as complementary backend systems.
• Strong system‑design skills with a demonstrated ability to decouple monolithic architectures, build reusable platform infrastructure, and optimize resource‑constrained environments.
• Exceptional communication and cross‑functional leadership skills, capable of influencing without direct authority to build alignment across Product, UX, Systems Engineering, and Hardware teams.
• AI‑native mindset with a proven track record of deploying agent systems to improve team velocity.

Preferred

• Familiarity with automotive context with Android.
• Experience establishing frameworks for third‑party experiences.
• Experience integrating new hardware features into an extensible framework for 1P and 3P usage.

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: $298,000—$368,000 USD