Director of Site Reliability Engineering

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.

Software Engineering builds the brains of Waymo's fully autonomous driving technology. Our software allows the Waymo Driver to perceive the world around it, make the right decision for every situation, and deliver people safely to their destinations. We think deeply and solve complex technical challenges in areas like robotics, perception, decision-making and deep learning, while collaborating with hardware and systems engineers. If you’re a software engineer or researcher who’s curious and passionate about Level 4 autonomous driving, we'd like to meet you.

This role reports to the Engineering Director. As Director of Site Reliability Engineering, you will ensure that Waymo operates with the reliability, performance, and resilience that our customers expect. You’ll lead the strategy and execution for observability, incident management, capacity planning, and continuous improvement of our production systems.

You Will:

• Define and execute the strategic roadmap for reliability, observability and automation


• Build and lead a world-class SRE organization that ensures exceptional reliability and performance of production systems


• Establish comprehensive observability across the Waymo including monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting


• Define and achieve ambitious SLOs that meet the demands of 24/7 operations used by millions for customers


• Drive incident response processes, post-mortems, and continuous improvement to prevent recurring issues


• Lead capacity planning and performance optimization to ensure the production systems scale efficiently


• Implement automation for deployment, operations, and remediation to reduce toil and improve reliability


• Champion a culture of reliability engineering across the organization, educating teams on best practices


• Manage disaster recovery planning and business continuity

You Have:

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering or SRE roles with 5+ years in SRE leadership


• Deep expertise in observability tools, monitoring systems, and incident management practices


• Strong background in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and production operations at scale


• Proficiency with automation, infrastructure and modern DevOps/SRE tooling


• Track record of improving system reliability through data-driven approaches and systematic problem-solving


• Excellent incident management and crisis leadership skills


• Strong collaboration abilities and experience partnering with engineering teams to improve reliability

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

$332,000—$421,000 USD