Data Infra Engineer at Waymo (Mountain View, CA)
Waymo· Mountain View, CA· $213k–$263k·
Role details
Job description
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.
This role follows a hybrid work schedule. You will:
- Design, develop, and maintain high-throughput distributed backend components and services (C++, Flume/Apache Spark/Flink/Beam) powering Waymo's Commercialization Data Lake.
- Own the scalable ingestion of data from raw system telemetry and RPC logs, processing petabytes of logs into reliable, daily canonical base tables.
- Build, harden, and democratize Data Pipeline Services, offering standard templates and self-service gateways for downstream consumption.
- Implement foundational compliance, privacy, and security infrastructure (e.g., GDPR wipeout, ACL management, BCID enforcement, and identity proxies).
- Establish rigorous operational standards, guarding pipelines with regression tests, staging environments, Canary/Progressive rollouts to defend high SLO.
- Collaborate with Data Engineers and Product Data Scientists to set global platform consistency, dependency tracing, and linear DAG architecture guidelines.
You have:
- BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent.
- 4+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, focused heavily on distributed systems, databases, and production monitoring.
- Excellent understanding of data structures, algorithms, and fundamental software design principles.
- Advanced proficiency in C++ and SQL applied to high-throughput batch and streaming processing pipelines.
- Prior experience running data pipelines through hardened release setups (Canarying, Staging environments, Automated Rollbacks).
We prefer:
- Extensive experience with distributed processing frameworks (e.g., Spark, Flink, Beam, Hadoop, Flume, or equivalent large-scale processing engines).
- Experience in building and maintaining Data Warehouse / Data Lake systems
- Experience baking Data Governance, Privacy, or Compliance layers (e.g., encryption, GDPR, RBAC/ACLs) directly into core infrastructure.
- High proficiency with Google-internal pipeline/data stacks (Flume, SQLP, Rapid, CAS, F1). 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
Why work at Waymo
- Impact: Work on technology that directly saves lives (1.4M traffic deaths globally each year) and reshapes the future of transportation.
- Culture: Waymo describes itself as a place for “ambitious thinkers and relentless problem solvers” with a deep respect for getting every detail right. Values include safety, innovation, and responsibility.
- Teams: Opportunities across Software Engineering, Hardware Engineering, AI Foundations, Product & Design, Operations & Supply Chain, Safety, Policy, and General & Administrative roles.
- Internships: Strong early-career program with internships for Bachelors, Masters, MBA, and PhD candidates, often leading to full-time offers.
- Hiring process: Transparent and structured. Includes an initial recruiter screen, 1-2 phone/video interviews, and a virtual onsite (up to 5 interviews). Emphasizes problem-solving, collaboration, and real-time thinking. AI tools are not permitted during technical assessments to ensure fair evaluation.
- Remote/hybrid policy: The careers page lists both on-site and remote roles, with most engineering and operations roles based in Mountain View, San Francisco, or other US locations.
- Benefits: Top-notch benefits, unique learning opportunities, thoughtful community engagement, and meaningful gatherings. Specific perks are not detailed publicly but are described as comprehensive.