The Simulator team builds simulations of realistic environments crucial for testing and training the Waymo Driver. We use modern machine learning techniques to model the complexities of the real world, including the behavior of diverse agents (vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists), intricate road networks, dynamic traffic control systems, and varying weather conditions. A core challenge is ensuring our simulations reflect reality. To guide the development of our simulator components, we create metrics and evaluation methodologies to measure realism. These metrics are important for assessing simulator quality, identifying critical sim-to-real gaps, and even serve as loss functions to train realistic simulation models – which, in turn, are fundamental to rigorously evaluating the Waymo Driver's performance and safety.

This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to a Senior Engineering Manager.

You will:

• Lead and manage a team of software engineers in charge of developing driving quality metrics, measuring the robustness of the Waymo Driver to its input (e.g. sensors data, maps), using a range of techniques including ML, statistics, and algorithms
• Define a long-term strategy, develop roadmaps, and guide the team to execute projects from ambiguous requirements to high-impact deliverables
• Use simulation creatively and mine real world driving logs to measure  driving performance
• Champion code health and best practices in a large and complex code base
• Collaborate with other engineers, data scientists, statisticians and the leadership team to deliver evaluation products and help make data driven decisions

You have:

• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Statistics, Physics, Math or another quantitative area
• 5+ years of experience in the field of software engineering
• Solid technical leadership in defining vision, strategy and priorities
• Proficiency in C++ or Python in a production environment
• Strong technical communication and collaboration skills

We prefer:

• 2+ years of experience in team management
• Experience coding in C++
• Experience with ML
• Experience with A/B experiment infrastructure
• Exposure to ad-hoc data analysis with SQL
• Experience working in the AV industry