Software Engineer / Data Scientist, Planner Evaluation Driving Sets

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they’re going. Since our start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has been focused on building the World’s Most Experienced Driver in hopes of improving the world's access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. Our Waymo Driver powers Waymo One, our fully autonomous ride-hailing service, as well as Waymo Via, our trucking and local delivery service. To date, Waymo has driven over 20 million miles autonomously on public roads across 25 U.S. cities and conducted over 20 billion miles of simulation testing.

The Simulation Organization enables Waymo to simulate and analyze millions of miles of driving every day. We can recreate, modify, and amplify our real-world experience -- or generate entirely new situations from scratch.  We work with teams across Waymo, enabling the rapid iterations in advancing self-driving technology. Our work was recently featured in The Atlantic - "Inside Waymo's Secret World for training Self-Driving Cars". As powerful as this system is, however, there are still many open problems to solve and much work ahead of us. 

Role Description

As a Software Engineer on the Driver Understanding and Evaluation team, you will work to understand and measure the performance and safety of our Waymo Driver, which is key to unlocking scale. Large scale experimentation and data driven decision making in autonomous driving has unique challenges - the long tail behavior matters more than the average case. Discovering and recreating the long tail is hard, and experimentation via real-world driving does not scale.

We are building Machine Learning models that represent and understand the world we drive in, and executing experimentation via large-scale realistic simulation. If you have a background in working on complex high-quality systems, and enjoy Machine Learning, Data Mining, experimentation and metric design, we’d like to meet you!

Responsibilities

• Seamlessly integrate logged data replay and simulated agents

• Quantify the performance and safety characteristics of the Waymo Driver

• Filter and mine large scale simulated data to detect the most interesting issues

• Build reliable and scalable infrastructure services that enable us to use simulation in new ways

• Automate with deep learning or streamline manual triage processes performed by a large team of operators

• Design car, cyclist or pedestrian agents that interact in realistic ways with the Waymo Driver

• Generate simulations that target specific challenges

• Accelerate onboard software development with improved tools and visualization

Minimum Qualifications

• A BS or MS in Computer Science or a similar discipline, or equivalent industry experience

• Experience with C++ or Python (or a willingness to learn) 

• A proven background navigating a large code base

• Passion for Self Driving Cars and the future of sustainable transportation

Preferred Qualifications

• Interest and/or experience with data labeling or Machine Learning data

• Full stack web development experience (frontend and backend)

• Experience learning from - and optimizing for - external users

• Experience in Machine Learning modeling or AV simulation, especially TensorFlow

Note: The following is only applicable for roles hired in the US. As we keep the safety of our employees and our communities top of mind, COVID-19 vaccinations continue to be a critical prevention measure to help end the pandemic.  Because of this, Waymo requires all US-based employees who perform work onsite for Waymo to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. If you are unable to be vaccinated, Waymo will provide a reasonable accommodation consistent with applicable law.