Senior Software Engineer, Waymo

• MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of industry experience in software development
• Proficiency in programming in Python or C++, including experience with relevant libraries for data handling and computation (e.g., NumPy, Pandas for Python)
• Experience with SQL for data querying and analysis
• Experience with software design principles, coding best practices, testing methodologies, and version control software
• Identify potential system performance or realism gaps (e.g., from specific examples or initial data exploration) and create data-driven approaches to investigate them
• Experience designing, implementing, and interpreting quantitative analyses or metrics to systematically evaluate system behavior and validate hypotheses (using concepts such as distributions, confidence intervals, etc.)
• Demonstrated experience taking quantitative findings through to implementation, resulting in productionized metrics, automated evaluation tools, or improvements to validation systems
• Experience building software pipelines for data processing, system evaluation, or metric computation, in the context of large-scale systems

Desirable

• The Simulator team builds state of the art simulations of realistic environments for the testing and training of the Waymo driver
• We use machine learning extensively to model the real world, including but not limited to, realistic agents (vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists etc.), roads, traffic control systems, weather etc
• To guide the development of simulator realism components, we create metrics to quantify realism, which are used to assess the quality of the simulator, identify sim2real gaps, and used as loss functions to train a more realistic simulator - which in turn is used to assess the quality of the Waymo Driver
• Develop novel methods to measure sim realism in the context of various simulator tech and applications
• Design scalable and efficient platforms and pipelines for measuring simulation realism across massive datasets
• Research and implement systems that can automatically discover salient realism metrics to guide simulator development priorities
• Collaborate with world-class engineering and research teams who develop and use large-scale ML models to enhance simulator fidelity
• Play an important role in a collaborative engineering team dedicated to building a high-fidelity simulator that directly powers the safety validation and performance evaluation of the Waymo Driver

Total funding: $11.1bn

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company that began as the Google self-driving car project in 2009. After initial development, it secured permits to deploy autonomous ride-hailing services in cities including Phoenix and San Francisco, but has recently hit a major bump in the road with safety concerns that resulted in a recall of over 400 self-driving cars.