---
title: 'Site Reliability Engineer, Lead at Waymo'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/site-reliability-engineer-lead-waymo-mountain-view-mj822zehcppc'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Site Reliability Engineer, Lead at Waymo

- **Company:** Waymo
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Compensation:** $298k–$368k
- **Posted:** 2026-09-04
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://careers.withwaymo.com/jobs?gh_jid=8157888

## 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.

As the Pipeline SRE Lead, you will play a key role in driving the reliability of our most critical release pipelines. You’ll lead the strategy and execution for observability, incident management, capacity planning, and continuous improvement of our production systems. You will be accountable for the response to novel, rare, or unexpected events encountered during our software release process. This includes both spearheading timely investigations and resolutions, as well as proactively partnering with engineering to evolve our software system to enhance their robustness and adaptability.

This unique role encompasses planet scale software delivery systems which underpin our rapidly growing and evolving fleet of autonomous vehicles operating in multiple cities. The challenges of ensuring reliability at our scale and pace is unprecedented. If you are a hands-on SRE lead, with strong software engineering skills,  who is passionate about solving first-of-their-kind problems with significant real-world impact, we'd like to meet you.

This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to the Head of Planner within the Onboard organization.

You will:

- Drive incident response processes, retrospectives, and continuous improvement to prevent recurring issues. Organize and participate in on call rotations for release oriented outages, along with disaster recovery planning and business continuity
- Harden software, develop playbooks, improve oncall metrics and post-mitigation workstreams, and improve robustness of the software system running our most critical release processes
- Lead the engineering analysis and response to novel, rare or unexpected events encountered during our development analysis cycle.
- Champion a culture of reliability engineering across the organization, including partnering with organization leads and others across the Onboard, Eval and Simulator organization to educate and improve large-scale software engineering best practices.
- Contribute to system software architecture to help improve its robustness and debuggability

You have:

- Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
- 10+ years of experience working on large-scale production software systems, especially machine learned systems
- 10+ years on hands on coding experience with C++
- Experience organizing and running oncall rotations
- Excellent influence without authority skills
- Organizational awareness, extremely collaborative, strong communication, focus on value add to the company and to the team
- Deep expertise in architecting large scale distributred systems, observability tools, monitoring systems, and incident management practices
- Strong background in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and production operations at scale
- Proficiency with automation, infrastructure and modern DevOps/SRE tooling
- Track record of improving system reliability through data-driven approaches and systematic problem-solving

We prefer:

- Experience leading hybrid hardware/software production systems
- Experience leading teams who work on modern deep ML / large scale models
- Track record of bringing about change in 1000+ person engineering organizations

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 $298,000—$368,000 USD

## About Waymo

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company that develops and operates the Waymo Driver, a self-driving system used for ride-hailing and trucking, with a mission to be the world’s most trusted driver.
- **Entity Type**: Private (subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google)
- **Headquarters**: Mountain View, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2009 (as the Google self-driving car project); became an independent company under Alphabet in 2016
- **Founders**: The project was initiated by Sebastian Thrun (Google X), with key early contributions from Anthony Levandowski and others. Current leadership is Co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, and Chief Safety Officer Mauricio Peña.

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Autonomous vehicles, self-driving technology, ride-hailing, autonomous trucking, mobility-as-a-service
- **Target customers**: B2C (riders via Waymo One), B2B (fleet operators, logistics companies, and partners), and enterprise (autonomous trucking and delivery)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “To be the world’s most trusted driver.” Waymo aims to save lives, drive inclusive mobility, and improve the state of the planet by making transportation safer, more accessible, and sustainable.

## Products & Services
- **Waymo One**: The world’s first commercial autonomous ride-hailing service. Offers fully driverless rides to the public in Metro Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The fleet is now all-electric (Jaguar I-PACE).
- **Waymo Via**: Autonomous trucking and logistics service for freight movement, operating with partners to move goods on highways.
- **Waymo Driver**: The company’s core autonomous driving system (software + hardware stack). It is designed to be integrated into various vehicle platforms for ride-hailing, trucking, and delivery.
- **Waymo Open Dataset**: A publicly available dataset of autonomous driving sensor data, provided to researchers to accelerate breakthroughs in the field.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (as a private subsidiary of Alphabet). Alphabet’s market cap is ~$2 trillion (as of mid-2025). Waymo is considered Alphabet’s most valuable “Other Bet.”
- **Key Metric**: Over 20 million rider-only (fully autonomous) rides served as of early 2025. 94% fewer serious injury crashes compared to human drivers over the same distance in operating cities.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Alphabet Inc. (parent company). Partners include Jaguar Land Rover (vehicle supply), Daimler Trucks (trucking), and various fleet operators and delivery services.
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid geographic expansion (largest fully autonomous service area in the world at 180 sq miles in Phoenix); transition to an all-electric fleet; expansion into Los Angeles and San Francisco; growing public trust (93% rider satisfaction rate); continuous hiring across engineering, operations, and AI.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & scale**: Waymo is the only company operating a fully autonomous, commercial, paid ride-hailing service across multiple major US cities, with millions of real-world miles driven without a human safety driver.
- **Deep Alphabet backing**: Access to vast resources, AI talent (DeepMind/Google Brain), and infrastructure (Google Maps, Cloud, AI chips).
- **Safety track record**: Publicly released data showing a 82-94% reduction in injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers, building regulatory and public trust.
- **Full-stack approach**: In-house development of hardware (LIDAR, cameras, radar), software (perception, planning, simulation), and operations (fleet management, rider experience).

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling safely**: Expanding service areas (adding more cities and suburbs) while maintaining a strong safety record.
- **All-electric fleet**: Transitioning the entire Waymo One fleet to zero-emission vehicles (Jaguar I-PACE) to align with sustainability goals.
- **Trucking & logistics**: Growing Waymo Via to capture the massive autonomous trucking market, partnering with OEMs and shippers.
- **AI & simulation**: Using advanced AI (including large models and generative AI) to improve the Waymo Driver’s decision-making and simulation-based validation.
- **Accessibility & inclusive mobility**: Designing for riders with disabilities, older adults, and underserved communities to ensure transportation is available to all.

## Why Work Here
- **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.

## Sources
1. [Waymo.com](https://waymo.com/) – Official company website (mission, history, safety data)
2. [Waymo About Page](https://waymo.com/about/) – Company history, leadership, and milestones
3. [Waymo Careers Page](https://careers.withwaymo.com/) – Culture, teams, hiring process, benefits
4. [Waymo Open Roles](https://careers.withwaymo.com/jobs/search) – Current job listings and departments
5. [Waymo How We Hire](https://careers.withwaymo.com/how-we-hire) – Interview process, tips, and accessibility

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