Senior Staff Tech Lead Manager (Simulator Efficiency)

Waymo; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 281,000 - 356,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus program

Equity incentive plan

Generous company benefits

Job summary

Waymo is looking for a technical leader for the Simulator Team in San Francisco. The role focuses on optimizing the Simulator Platform’s architecture, ensuring high performance and resource utilization. Candidates should have a BS/MS in relevant fields, over 6 years of experience, and strong C++ skills. The position offers a competitive salary range of $281,000 – $356,000. Employees are eligible for annual bonuses, equity incentives, and generous benefits.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience on large-scale or highly complex systems.
• Proven track record as a technical lead for senior engineering teams.
• Solid software management experience in infrastructure/systems performance.

Responsibilities

• Develop Simulator's architecture improvements and frameworks.
• Optimize system resource usage at scale.
• Collaborate to improve compute performance bottlenecks.

Skills

C++

Technical vision

Communication skills

System optimization

Collaboration

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Physics, Mathematics

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. We develop industry‑leading simulation solutions using advanced ML algorithms that measure and enhance the performance of the Waymo Driver. The Simulator platform is complex and evolving. To ensure that Waymo's Simulation and Evaluation system can scale with new developing Simulation technologies as well as Waymo's growth, this technical leadership role will look across multiple teams and guide strategy for the entire Simulator software stack. This can be everything from low‑level optimization up through higher level configuration, all with an eye towards improved utilization across various resources (CPU/RAM/TPU/GPU). You will lead the Simulator Platform's efficiency efforts and represent the team in wider Waymo performance‑related efforts.

You will:

• Develop Simulator's architecture improvements and frameworks that maximize performance and compute utilization.
• Evolve compute usage of simulation to enable continued scaling where the system runs efficiently in our data centers.
• Collaborate with evaluation and infrastructure teams to identify and improve compute performance bottlenecks across the stack.
• Design, build, and optimize the simulator to enable high throughput and high compute utilization for both single instance simulation and large scale simulations.
• Develop necessary high‑scale performance evaluation, debugging, and software change management processes.
• Optimize system resource usage of the simulation at scale: minimize CPU utilization and latency, minimize RAM consumption, and intelligently determine which computations should happen on CPU, GPU, and TPU.

You have:

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Physics, Mathematics, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• Proven track record of setting technical vision, driving multi‑quarter roadmaps, and delivering impactful data projects as a technical lead for senior engineering teams, with demonstrated ability to influence across organizational boundaries.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical designs, trade‑offs, and strategies to diverse stakeholders, including senior leadership and partner engineering, data scientists, and product teams.
• 6+ years of experience on large‑scale or highly complex systems.
• Solid software management experience in infrastructure/systems/performance domain optimizing end‑to‑end system for high performance metrics.
• Extensive experience acting as technical lead in performance/software infrastructure domain.
• Proficient in C++.
• Define roadmap/portfolio of projects optimizing for end results overall across all aspects of the problem space.
• Setup collaboration structures across team boundaries.

We prefer:

• Experience in robotics.
• Experience in low‑level optimization techniques, frameworks (SIMD/CUDA), and ML performance/frameworks.
• Experience in large‑scale evaluation techniques/data science and building performance metrics/tooling.
• Experience in large‑scale software re‑architecture projects.

The expected base salary range for this full‑time position across U.S. 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: $281,000 – $356,000 USD