Tech Lead Manager- Onboard Software Performance

Waymo; Mountain View (WY); Hybrid; USD 238,000 - 302,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus program

Equity incentives

Generous benefits

Job summary

Waymo is seeking an experienced engineer for the Onboard Software Performance team to optimize the car and data center compute, ensuring latency targets and efficient resource use. You will lead architecture improvements and collaborate across teams, including hardware, to scale performance for autonomous driving applications.

The role requires strong C++ experience, a track record in performance engineering, and ability to define roadmaps and collaborative structures.

Qualifications

• 6 years of software engineering experience on large scale/high complexity systems
• 2 years of software management experience in infrastructure/systems/performance domains
• 4 years of experience as technical lead in performance/software infrastructure
• 4 years of experience in C++
• Define roadmap/portfolio of projects optimizing for end results across the problem space
• Setup collaboration structures across team boundaries

Responsibilities

• Develop modular architecture improvements and frameworks to maximize performance and compute utilization
• Evolve compute usage on car and simulation for scaling and efficiency
• Collaborate with onboard teams to identify and fix compute bottlenecks
• Collaborate with hardware teams to co-design hardware/software for best performance
• Ensure strong performance across driving complexity and rare events
• Design latency-optimized systems for collision avoidance
• Develop high-scale performance evaluation, debugging, and change-management processes
• Optimize system resource usage for cloud-scale simulation: minimize CPU, RAM, and latency

Skills

C++

Performance optimization

System architecture

Technical leadership

Cross-team collaboration

Education

BS/MS in CS/EE/Robotics/Physics/Math

Tools

CUDA

Linux

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.

Onboard Software Performance team ensures that systems running on ADV (Autonomously Driven Vehicle) meet strict performance requirements such as producing necessary outputs within strict latency targets and using an appropriately allocated amount of compute resources (CPU/GPU/TPU/RAM etc) for each respective submodule. All of this needs to be done at scale with performance guarantees of many 9s of reliability while enabling high velocity of system evolution.

In this hybrid role, you will report to a Senior Staff Engineer, Technical Lead Manager.

You will:

• Develop ADV’s modular architecture improvements and frameworks that maximize performance and compute utilization and ROI for driving quality
• Evolve our compute usage on the car and simulation to enable continued scaling where the system runs fast on the car and efficiently in our data center
• Collaborating with onboard teams to identify and improve compute performance bottlenecks across the stack to improve performance/driving quality
• Collaborating with hardware teams to codesign hardware/software and optimize the software for best performance on our hardware platform
• Ensuring our performance is strong at any driving complexity including as we scale to even more complex driving environments and encounter rarer events
• Ensuring state of the art reaction latency for collision avoidance via novel system/architecture designs and extremely fast nominal performance
• Developing necessary high scale performance evaluation, debugging and software change management processes
• Optimizing system resource usage to simulation at scale in Cloud datacenters: minimizing CPU utilization and latency, minimizing RAM consumption, intelligently determining which computations should happen on CPU, GPU, and TPU.

You have:

• BS/MS in Comp Sci, EE, Robotics, Physics, Math, or related field (or equivalent experience)
• 6 years of software engineering experience on large scale/high complexity system (supported by hundreds of engineers)
• 2 years of software management experience with at least 4 years in infrastructure/systems/performance domain optimizing end to end system for high performance metrics
• 4 years of experience acting as technical lead in performance/software infrastructure domain
• 4 years of experience 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

#LI-Hybrid

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

$238,000—$302,000 USD