Staff Tech Lead Software Engineer, Vehicle Realism Platform

Location: Mountain View, CA, USA; San Francisco, CA, USA

Department: Simulation (7XW)

Waymo’s Simulation Team builds technology that supports the development of the Waymo Driver. It allows the Waymo driver to be tested on millions of miles of traffic before it hits the road. Simulation is crucial to Waymo’s mission of developing the world’s most experienced driver.

The VRP (Vehicle Realism Platform) team builds tools and systems to enable realistic autonomous-driving simulation capabilities across all hardware platforms and diverse driving conditions. VRP manages the interface between the core Simulator Architecture and the physical representation of the vehicle, which includes platform expression, physics, environment, timing, and hardware models in the Simulator. We ensure that signals we get from simulation reflect real-world driving behavior. Our team empowers engineers across Waymo to safely iterate, test, and validate autonomous driving at scale, directly supporting autonomous driving software development, evaluation, and deployment worldwide .

You will:

• Collaborate with onboard and research engineers to expand simulation capabilities and achieve critical Waymo milestones.
• Monitor and improve the reproducibility, reliability, and usability of the Waymo simulator.
• Design long-term architectures to accommodate a growing number of internal customers and product requirements.
• Bridge vehicle subsystems and simulation infrastructure to enhance overall robotic realism.
• Partner closely with collaborators from Simulator, Eval, Hardware, and Onboard orgs, integrating the building blocks they provide and turning them into reliable, reproducible simulation solutions.

You have:

• Hands-on experience building a popular (internal or external-facing) product
• Experience on backend knowledge such as workflows, databases, SQL, debugging, production monitoring, etc
• 6+ years experience in software development
• A strong background in C++

We prefer:

• Experience with the release of software in a highly distributed heterogeneous execution environment
• Experience with systems programming (game engines, database, OS, distributed)
• Experience with robotics or perception systems
• Experience with performance optimization in complex backend and infrastructure systems
• Experience with ML