Senior Onboard Software Performance Engineer (C++)

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

You will:

• Report into the Manager of Onboard Software Performance


• Develop ADV's modular architecture improvements and frameworks that maximize performance and compute use and ROI for driving quality


• Evolve our compute usage on the car and simulation to promote continued scaling where the system runs fast on the car and in our data center


• Collaborate with onboard teams to identify and improve compute performance bottlenecks across the stack to improve performance/driving quality


• Collaborate with hardware teams to codesign hardware/software and improve the software for best performance on our hardware platform


• Ensure reaction latency for collision avoidance with and help design novel system/architecture for extremely fast nominal performance


• Develop necessary high scale performance evaluation, debugging and software change management processes


• Improve system resource usage to simulation at scale in Cloud datacenters: minimizing CPU use and latency, minimizing RAM usage, intelligently determining which computations should happen on CPU, GPU, and TPU.

You have:

• BS in Comp Sci, EE, Robotics, Physics, Math, or related field (or equivalent experience)


• 5 years of experience as a software engineer or similar roles


• 5 years of experience in C++


• 5 year of experience optimizing software using profile guided techniques

We prefer:

• 2 years in infrastructure/systems/performance domain optimizing end-to-end systems


• 2 years of experience working on a large-scale/high complexity system (supported by hundreds of engineers)


• Experience in robotics


• Experience in low-level optimization techniques, frameworks (SIMD/CUDA) and ML performance/frameworks


• Experience in evaluation techniques

#LI-Hybrid

This is a hybrid remote/in-office role.

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