Senior Software Engineer, Model Lifecycle

Waymo; Kirkland (WA); On-site; USD 204,000 - 259,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary annual bonus program

Equity incentive plan

Generous Company benefits program

Job summary

A leader in autonomous driving technology seeks an experienced data engineer. You will design and maintain scalable data pipelines for complex sensor data, ensuring efficient model training. The ideal candidate has outstanding programming skills in C++ or Python, experience in ML data engineering, and a passion for autonomous driving applications. The role offers a competitive salary range between $204,000 and $259,000, with the opportunity for bonuses and comprehensive benefits.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of industry experience or PhD + 2 years of experience.
• Experience with the ML development lifecycle.
• Passionate about data-centric AI and autonomous driving applications.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain scalable data pipelines for complex sensor data.
• Develop infrastructure for reliable datasets for ML models.
• Collaborate closely with ML engineers and research scientists.

Skills

C++

Python

ML data engineering

Data pipelines

Data curation

Education

BS/MS in relevant field

PhD in relevant field

Tools

Apache Spark

Google Cloud Dataflow

AWS Data Pipeline

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 core challenge within Model Lifecycle is accelerating Waymo's ML development cycle. As we scale to new cities and vehicle platforms, our data volume is exploding, and our models are becoming more complex, handling more and more tasks. This team is critical to controlling that complexity.

In this hybrid role, you will report to an engineering manager.

You Will

• Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines to process many petabytes of complex sensor data, making it ready for efficient model training and evaluation.
• Develop infrastructure to produce reliable, high‑quality datasets for a wide range of ML models, from real‑time on‑car models to large‑scale offboard foundation models.
• Build towards an automated, unified data flywheel— a datagen and ingestion solution that seamlessly connects data curation to model training.
• Develop infrastructure for Perception‑wide model training and release‑ready packaging, ensuring the model development lifecycle is robust, efficient, and reproducible.
• Maintain and support critical data generation infrastructure and data refreshes for the Perception team.
• Automate data quality and validation checks to ensure the integrity, consistency, and trustworthiness of our datasets as we scale to new cities and vehicle platforms.
• Collaborate closely with ML engineers, research scientists, and core infrastructure teams to understand user needs and deliver impactful ML workflows.

You Have

• Outstanding programming skills in C++ or Python.
• Experience in ML data engineering, including data pipelines, data curation, data balancing, etc.
• Experience with the ML development lifecycle, including data engineering, model training, model evaluation, and model deployment.
• BS/MS and 5+ years of industry experience, or PhD + 2 years of industry experience.
• Passionate about data‑centric AI and autonomous driving applications.

We Prefer

• Experience in working in cross‑functional settings to support data users and collaborating with infrastructure stakeholders; customer‑oriented mindset.
• Hands‑on experience in building large‑scale data processing or retrieval systems and pipelines: Apache Spark, Apache Beam, Google Cloud Dataflow, AWS Data Pipeline, Faiss/ScaNN, etc.
• Experience building automated ML pipelines—data pipelines, continuous model training/​evaluation pipelines, etc.

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