Director of Engineering, Simulation Evaluation

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.

We are seeking an experienced Director, Simulation Evaluation to lead our efforts in rigorously assessing the safety, compliance, and service quality of the Waymo Driver. This critical role will be instrumental in scaling our autonomous vehicle technology by developing and overseeing the advanced quantitative methodologies and infrastructure required to evaluate performance in new cities, novel situations, and address issues identified in the field.

You will lead a team of highly skilled quantitative evaluation engineers and data scientists focused on developing innovative workflows and tools that accelerate the evaluation of the Waymo Driver. Your leadership will be pivotal in ensuring the robustness and scalability of our evaluation processes as we expand our operations.

You will :

• Define and Drive Strategy : Develop and execute the strategic roadmap for quantitative evaluation, aligning it with Waymo's business objectives and product development lifecycle. Drive the technical strategy for how we measure the Waymo driver's behavior in all situations, from interactions with pedestrians, to navigating construction zones.
• Lead and Mentor a High-Performing Team : Recruit, build, and lead a team of quantitative evaluation specialists, fostering a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement. This includes guiding individual contributors who are focused on :
• Creating metrics and evaluations for the areas that matter most to Waymo.
• Developing ML-based tooling for data mining, identification, sampling, and optimization of evaluation workflows using simulations of logged and synthetically generated driving scenarios.
• Improving product requirements for "eval of eval" tools and measurements to understand and control the quality of Waymo's driving evaluation tools.
• Translating product requirements into engineering and data science tasks, and implementing these tasks.
• Critically examining and improving the data and statistical methods used to evaluate our tools.
• Extending and improving underlying infrastructure to meet product needs and ensure consistency across the stack.
• Working with partners to integrate evaluation tools into workflows and processes.
• Champion Quantitative Rigor : Oversee the design, development, and implementation of sophisticated quantitative methods and statistical models for evaluating the Waymo Driver's performance across diverse operational domains.
• Innovate Evaluation Workflows : Drive the creation of scalable and efficient workflows for evaluating safety, compliance, and service quality, crucial for expanding into new operational design domains (ODDs) and addressing emergent challenges.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally : Partner closely with onboard engineering, system engineering, and commercial teams, product management, operations, and legal teams to integrate evaluation insights into product development cycles and inform strategic decision-making.
• Ensure Data Integrity and Infrastructure : Guide the development and maintenance of robust data processing pipelines and underlying infrastructure to support large-scale quantitative evaluation, ensuring data quality and consistency.
• Communicate Insights : Clearly communicate complex quantitative findings and recommendations to diverse stakeholders, including senior leadership, to drive product improvements and business outcomes.

You have :

We prefer :

#LI-Hybrid

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