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techroles

Senior Onboard Developer Platform Software Engineer

Waymo Open
Mountain View Senior Backend Engineering

At a glance

Senior Backend Engineering role at Waymo. Mountain View · $213,000–$263,000 base.

SalaryStated by Waymo
$213,000 – $263,000
Base salary for this role, in USD per year, as published in the posting.
This role, from WaymoOur estimate for the market: $209,375–$238,000Median $224,500
The range includes the market median of $224,500 for senior backend engineering roles in Mountain View.
Worked out from 10 postings that stated pay, median $224,500. Last updated Nov 5, 2026.
RoleBackend Engineering
SenioritySenior
LocationMountain View
Base pay$213,000–$263,000
PostedDec 15, 2025
Role brief

techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.

What you'll do

  • Build dependable software for simulation, evaluation, reinforcement-learning refinement and analysis
  • Expand the simulation and evaluation platform to speed onboard engineers’ development feedback loop
  • Design modular driving-system frameworks that balance realistic, repeatable simulation with fast on-car performance
  • Reduce compute, memory use and delay across cloud simulations, choosing suitable CPU, GPU or TPU workloads
  • Track performance bottlenecks across driving, simulation and analysis software, and establish evaluation and debugging practices

What you bring

  • A computer science, electrical engineering, robotics, physics or math degree, or equivalent experience
  • At least three years in software engineering or a similar role, including three years using C++
  • Two or more years building infrastructure and tools that are scalable, performant and straightforward to use
  • At least two years working on a complex system used by hundreds of engineers

Who this fits

This senior engineering role suits someone focused on infrastructure, system performance and developer tools for onboard software teams. It is hybrid in Mountain View, and you report to a staff engineer who is also a technical lead manager.

From the employer

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.

Waymo is in the process of hyper-scaling. We must enhance developer productivity of onboard engineers to enable the entire organization to quickly scale and address emerging challenges.

The goal of this team is to build the infrastructure, architecture, tooling, and platform necessary to accelerate development by identifying and addressing the critical needs and bottlenecks faced by onboard engineers.

In this hybrid role you will report to a Staff Software Engineer / Tech Lead Manager.

You will:

  • Develop reliable, scalable, and maintainable systems to meet user needs, including accelerating large-scale simulation and eval, reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning pipeline, and analysis.
  • Evolve and scale up the simulation and evaluation platform to accelerate the "inner loop" of software development by 10X for onboard engineers (500+).
  • Develop the ADV's modular architecture and frameworks to achieve low latency, high reproducibility and realism when simulating in our data centers, while maintaining high performance for on-car driving.
  • Optimize system resource usage to simulation at scale in Cloud datacenters: minimizing CPU utilization and latency, minimizing RAM consumption, intelligently determining which computations should happen on CPU, GPU, and TPU.
  • Collaborate to resolve compute performance bottlenecks throughout the ADV, simulator and analysis software stacks, ensuring end-to-end low latency for simulation and analysis.
  • Develop necessary high scale performance evaluation, debugging and software change management processes.

You have:

  • BS in Comp Sci, EE, Robotics, Physics, Math, or related field (or equivalent experience)
  • 3 years of experience as a Software Engineer or similar roles
  • 3 years of experience in C++
  • 2 years of experience working on a large-scale/high complexity system (supported by hundreds of engineers)
  • 2 years of experience working on infrastructure work: building performant, easy to use, scalable systems and tools.

We prefer:

  • 2 years in infrastructure/systems/performance domain optimizing end-to-end system for high performance
  • 2 years of experience optimizing software systems using profile guided techniques
  • Experience in large-scale evaluation techniques
  • Experience in large-scale software re-architecture projects
  • Experience in ML pipelines and workflows

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$213,000—$263,000 USD
Opportunity

Backend Engineering work from LinkedIn, X, Reddit and Upwork, in one list.

Each morning you get everything that fits, strongest first.

Backend Engineering$210k+

Find me work

By the team behind techroles.

Find me work
Opportunity

Backend Engineering work from LinkedIn, X, Reddit and Upwork, in one list.

Each morning you get everything that fits, strongest first.

Find me work

By the team behind techroles.