Staff Tech Lead Software Engineer, Vehicle Realism Platform

The Simulator Team at Waymo builds state-of-the-art simulations of realistic environments for testing and training the Waymo Driver. The team is be a diverse, and collaborative group of software engineers, machine learning (ML) engineers, and data scientists. We develop industry-leading simulation solutions that measure and enhance the performance of the Waymo Driver. We achieve those goals by jointly modeling the real world, including self driving vehicle simulation, realistic agents (vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists), roads, traffic control systems, and weather conditions, and the full sensor suite including camera, Lidar and radars. Waymo's simulation allows the self driving software to be tested on millions of miles of traffic before they even hit the road. It 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.

You will:

• Collaborate with onboard and research engineers to scale simulation 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.
• You'll 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, production monitoring, etc
• Strong 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
• Previous TL experience