---
title: 'Tech Lead, Self Driving Eval Infrastructure at Waymo'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/tech-lead-self-driving-eval-infrastructure-waymo-mountain-view-raw665ehx6cg'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Tech Lead, Self Driving Eval Infrastructure at Waymo

- **Company:** Waymo
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Compensation:** $281k–$356k
- **Posted:** 2025-12-05
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://careers.withwaymo.com/jobs?gh_jid=7449213

## 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.

Waymo generates an unprecedented scale and complexity of data from billions of miles driven in simulation, millions on public roads, and the growing commercial operations. At the heart of achieving our mission lies the ability to deeply understand this data.

World-class data analysis infrastructure is the bedrock of Waymo's success. It is absolutely critical for:

- Validating the safety and performance of the Waymo Driver.
- Accelerating research and development cycles across engineering, including Simulation, Onboard, and Machine Learning.
- Enabling data-driven decisions for our commercial operations and product strategy.
- Standardizing how we measure progress and compare performance across different contexts.

The insights derived from our data platforms directly influence every aspect of our technology and business. We are looking for an exceptional technical leader to drive the vision and architecture of these vital systems.

About the Role:

We are seeking an exceptional a Leader to provide technical leadership and architectural vision for the core data platforms that power Waymo's insights and decision-making. This role is pivotal in shaping how Waymo leverages data to understand complex scenarios, measure progress, and ultimately deploy and operate our autonomous technology safely and effectively across the globe. You will be instrumental in tackling some of our most challenging data systems problems, from ensuring metrics consistency to building a scalable single source of truth for our ride-hail commercialization expansion.

You will:

- Lead the architectural design and technical strategy for Waymo's core data platforms, encompassing a "Single Source of Truth" data lake for Commercialization and “Metrics Portability and Standardization” for Driver Evaluations.
- Establish and enforce comprehensive data governance frameworks across the data ecosystem, enabling easy data discoverability, and enhancing data quality.
- Identify and address inefficiencies in the data development lifecycle. Drive initiatives to improve developer productivity, streamline workflows, and enhance the overall effectiveness of the data engineering and metrics development functions in Waymo.
- Serve as a lead technical liaison, collaborating deeply with Simulation, Onboard, ML, and Commercialization teams to understand data needs, define data contracts, translate requirements into technical solutions, and ensure alignment on architectural direction.
- Mentor senior engineers, guide critical technical decisions, and champion best practices in data engineering, including system reliability, efficiency, developer experience, and innovation to address new challenges.

You have:

- Proven track record of setting technical vision, driving multi-quarter roadmaps, and delivering impactful data projects as a technical lead for senior engineering teams, with demonstrated ability to influence across organizational boundaries.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical designs, trade-offs, and strategies to diverse stakeholders, including senior leadership and partner engineering, data scientists, and product teams.
- Extensive experience architecting, building, and operating complex, large-scale distributed data systems (e.g., data lakes, lakehouse, data mesh, streaming platforms, query engines).
- Deep expertise in designing and implementing data governance principles, including metadata systems, data lineage, data quality frameworks, and data discoverability solutions at scale.
- Strong experience in designing and evolving data-centric APIs, schemas, and data contracts to ensure system interoperability, portability, and long-term maintainability.
- Expertise in data pipeline and query engine development and proficiencies in writing both SQL and one of C++/Java/Python code language.

We prefer:

- Familiarity with data from autonomous vehicle operations, logistics, or ride-hailing business domains.
- Experience with Google's data infrastructure and tools such as F1 Query, Napa, Flume, Plx, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) data services such as BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, etc.

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 $281,000—$356,000 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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