Staff Data Scientist, Safety Metrics

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 Planner Evaluation team works on one of the key challenges in autonomous driving: measuring and improving the quality of the software that drives the car. We are looking for experienced data-minded software engineers and data scientists to help us improve how we characterize and evaluate changes to the Onboard software stack (Planner, Perception, etc).

The primary responsibility of this role is to simplify, validate, own, and organize the most ubiquitous safety metrics at Waymo. This role will engage deeply with a wide span of stakeholders to understand core use cases of these safety metrics, and through deep understanding of the data, form expert opinion and recommendations on the most appropriate solutions and their interpretations. They will validate and evolve metric quality to satisfy the ever-expanding use cases (new platforms, new territories) of Waymo's product. If you are passionate about autonomous vehicles and how to use rich, complex data to drive decision making, this is the role for you!

In this hybrid role, you will report to a Data Science Manager.

You will:

• Design, implement, validate and launch driving behavior metrics


• Use simulations and real world examples to build datasets for model training and metric validation


• Design A/B experiments to evaluate two versions of software


• Collect, align, and advise stakeholder needs, providing expert opinion on how best to run rigorous, statistical evaluation.

You have:

• PhD in Statistics, Math, Physics, or another quantitative area (e.g., Computer Science, Robotics)


• 7+ years of industry experience


• Strong communication/leadership to address a high surface area across different organizations and products


• Excellent data skills that produce efficient, data-reasoned choices for simplifying metrics and validating their quality


• Proficiency in coding (across C++, Python, SQL) that prevents them from being bottlenecked by Waymo's metric infrastructures


• Ability to take ambiguous business requirements and propose a technical solution

We prefer:

• Experience with A/B experiment infrastructure


• Experience building and validating metrics to measure quality in complex systems


• Exposure to ad-hoc data analysis tools for rapid modeling and prototyping


• Experience coding in C++

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

$238,000—$302,000 USD