Senior / Staff Research Engineer, Waabi

Simulation Assets & Content Systems

$155-269k

+ Equity incentive awards and an annual performance bonus

AWS

GCP

Python

C++

Rust

Senior and Expert level

San Francisco Bay Area

Toronto

Remote from Canada, US

AI-powered self-driving technology

Be an early applicant

AI-powered self-driving technology

201-500 employees

B2BTravelCarsAugmented RealitySaaS

Be an early applicant

$155-269k

+ Equity incentive awards and an annual performance bonus

AWS

GCP

Python

C++

Rust

Senior and Expert level

San Francisco Bay Area

Toronto

Remote from Canada, US

201-500 employees

B2BTravelCarsAugmented RealitySaaS

Company mission

To bring commercially viable self-driving technology to society.

Job

Company

Role

Who you are

Shipping Production Software. You have experience reading and developing production-quality software at scale, not just prototypes. You have shipped systems that other engineers and researchers depend on day-to-day
3D Content Pipelines. You have built or extended large-scale 3D content pipelines — ingestion, processing, validation, versioning, and serving: for graphics, simulation, VFX, games, robotics, or AV. You understand the failure modes that emerge at tens of thousands of assets
Modern 3D Representations. You are fluent across at least several of: traditional mesh/material/PBR, OpenUSD, NeRF, 3D Gaussian Splatting, and procedural/generative content. You understand the trade-offs between paradigms — fidelity, edit-ability, runtime cost, storage, interop, and can make pragmatic choices
Cloud Infrastructure at Scale. Experience designing, launching, and debugging GPU jobs in the cloud (AWS, GCP, or equivalent), including job orchestration, cost modeling, and throughput optimization for batch and pipeline workloads
Strong software engineering fundamentals. You write efficient and maintainable code in Python, as well as in at least one native systems language such as C++ or Rust

What the job involves

Be part of a multidisciplinary team of Research Scientists and Engineers building the content backbone of a best-in-class multi-sensor simulation stack
Architect and own asset pipelines end-to-end: From raw sensor logs all the way into simulation-ready representations (e.g., 3DGS, NeRF, mesh, hybrid), validation, packaging, and serving into Waabi World
Design schemas, formats, and storage for a heterogeneous asset library spanning traditional mesh/material assets, neural representations, and generative-model outputs. Ownership of design decisions ranging from formats and compression, to streaming, and cross-renderer interop
Build tooling and visualization that lets research scientists, simulation engineers, and technical artists inspect, compare, debug, and curate assets at the scale of tens of thousands of items — including search, similarity, lineage, and regression review
Integrate cutting-edge research into the pipeline — collaborate with the neural rendering and generative AI teams to productionize the latest reconstruction, diffusion, and world-model techniques as first-class steps in the asset lifecycle
Collaborate with autonomy and safety teams to ensure the asset catalog meets the diversity, realism, and coverage demands of training and closed-loop evaluation

Our take

Autonomous vehicle technology is rapidly developing, and many sectors are recognizing its value. However, whilst the self-driving industry has made significant advancements there is much more that can be done. There are challenges in this space surrounding scale and developing commercially viable self-driving technology.

Waabi hopes to tackle these challenges and be the leader in self-driving technology with their "AI first approach". The company said that combined with a closed-loop simulator, this approach will allow both common driving scenarios and safety-critical edge cases to be tested at scale - solving one of the key issues in the industry.

Waabi has a growing partnership with Volvo, which has seen the two companies develop an autonomous truck together. Volvo has also backed Waabi financially, as have other investors - with the company raising a whopping $1 billion in 2026. This capital will be used to expand into robotaxis through a new partnership with Uber.

Kirsty

Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle

Insights

Led by a woman

Top investors

81% employee growth in 12 months

Glassdoor (4.5)

Company

Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)

Jan 2026

$750m

SERIES C

Jun 2024

$200m

SERIES B

Total funding: $1.0bn

Leadership

Raquel Urtasun

(Founder & CEO)

Previously worked at Uber as Chief Scientist, Head of Uber ATG R&D. Is also a professor at the University of Toronto.

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