Senior Staff Software Engineer

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.

Waymo generates an unprecedented scale and complexity of data from billions of miles driven in simulation, millions on public roads, and the growing commercial operations. At the heart of achieving our mission lies the ability to deeply understand this data.

World-class data analysis infrastructure is the bedrock of Waymo's success. It is absolutely critical for:

• Validating the safety and performance of the Waymo Driver.
• Accelerating research and development cycles across engineering, including Simulation, Onboard, and Machine Learning.
• Enabling data-driven decisions for our commercial operations and product strategy.
• Standardizing how we measure progress and compare performance across different contexts.

The insights derived from our data platforms directly influence every aspect of our technology and business. We are looking for an exceptional technical leader to drive the vision and architecture of these vital systems.

About the Role:

We are seeking an exceptional Senior Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership and architectural vision for the core data platforms that power Waymo's insights and decision-making. This role is pivotal in shaping how Waymo leverages data to understand complex scenarios, measure progress, and ultimately deploy and operate our autonomous technology safely and effectively across the globe. You will be instrumental in tackling some of our most challenging data systems problems, from ensuring metrics consistency to building a scalable single source of truth for our ride-hail commercialization expansion.

You will:

• Lead the architectural design and technical strategy for Waymo's core data platforms, encompassing a "Single Source of Truth" data lake for Commercialization and "Metrics Portability and Standardization" for Driver Evaluations.
• Establish and enforce comprehensive data governance frameworks across the data ecosystem, enabling easy data discoverability, and enhancing data quality.
• Identify and address inefficiencies in the data development lifecycle. Drive initiatives to improve developer productivity, streamline workflows, and enhance the overall effectiveness of the data engineering and metrics development functions in Waymo.
• Serve as a lead technical liaison, collaborating deeply with Simulation, Onboard, ML, and Commercialization teams to understand data needs, define data contracts, translate requirements into technical solutions, and ensure alignment on architectural direction.
• Mentor senior engineers, guide critical technical decisions, and champion best practices in data engineering, including system reliability, efficiency, developer experience, and innovation to address new challenges.

You have:

• 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.
• Extensive experience architecting, building, and operating complex, large-scale distributed data systems (e.g., data lakes, lakehouse, data mesh, streaming platforms, query engines).
• Deep expertise in designing and implementing data governance principles, including metadata systems, data lineage, data quality frameworks, and data discoverability solutions at scale.
• Strong experience in designing and evolving data-centric APIs, schemas, and data contracts to ensure system interoperability, portability, and long-term maintainability.
• Expertise in data pipeline and query engine development and proficiencies in writing both SQL and one of C++/Java/Python code language.

We prefer:

• Familiarity with data from autonomous vehicle operations, logistics, or ride-hailing business domains.
• Experience with Google's data infrastructure and tools such as F1 Query, Napa, Flume, Plx, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) data services such as BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, 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.