New

Software Engineer, Planner Reasoning

Waymo
$170,000-$216,000 USD
United States, California, San Francisco
Oct 15, 2025
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. The Planner Reasoning Team builds technology that has an extremely broad impact across the Waymo organization and is the team most directly responsible for the Waymo Driver's behavior. We have wide reaching impact into both onboard and off-board system architecture, paving the way for future-looking deep-learning-based explorations. In this team, you'll have an impact on scaling our Waymo Driver's performance and maintaining and improving our excellent safety record as Waymo expands to more cities. In this hybrid role, you will report to an Engineering Manager. You will: Develop business logic software to evolve driving performance of the Waymo Driver Work cross-functionally on safety, road rules compliance, and ride quality Develop and implement methods to evaluate and improve Waymo driving behaviors Evaluate new proposed changes utilizing a range of data-driven methods Analyze large amounts of data of real world and simulated driving, understanding, characterizing and clustering the performance of the Waymo Driver Interact with ML models to maximize their impact towards solving driving problems You have: Bachelors in Computer Science, Robotics, Math, Physics, Statistics (or similar technical field of study) or equivalent practical experience 3+ years of Software Engineering experience in Python or C++ Experience debugging and improving live, production systems Experience with designing scalable software architectures for complex systems Demonstrated alignment with Waymo's Values and Behaviors We prefer: Proficiency in C++ AV, Robotics, Evaluation or Applied ML experience Prior Evaluation experience, contributing to scalable evaluation 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 $170,000 — $216,000 USD