Staff Software Engineer, Simulator Platform
- Salary
- $251,000 - $310,000
- Level
- Staff
- Work type
- Hybrid · Mountain View
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 7 March 2026.
About the role
Waymo's standard text
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 Simulator Team at Waymo builds state-of-the-art simulations of realistic environments for testing and training the Waymo Driver. Your team will be a diverse, and collaborative group of machine learning (ML) engineers, software engineers and data scientists. We develop industry-leading simulation solutions using advanced ML algorithms that measure and enhance the performance of the Waymo Driver.
We achieve those goals by jointly modeling the real world, including realistic agents (vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists), roads, traffic control systems, and weather conditions, and the full sensor suite including camera, Lidar and radars.
To increase the fidelity, scalability and controllability of our simulations,we employ the latest ML technologies such as large language models, foundational world models, and reconstructive methods trained on large-scale datasets with both generative and reconstructive technologies, as well as traditional rendering approaches.
In this hybrid role, you will report to a Senior Staff Engineering Manager.
You will:
- Work closely with onboard and research engineers to scale simulation and enable critical Waymo milestones
- Support development, testing and evolution of mapping data in the simulator
- Improve / monitor the performance, scalability and the reliability of the simulator
- Design the long term architecture to fit the product to an increasing number of internal customers
You have:
- Hands-on experience building a popular (internal- or external-facing) product.
- 5+ years of experience with backend knowledge such as workflows, databases, SQL, production monitoring, etc
- Strong in C++
- Bachelor’s degree (e.g., in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field) or equivalent practical experience.
We prefer:
- Experience with the release of software in a highly distributed heterogeneous execution environment
- Experience with systems programming (game engines, database, OS, distributed)
- Experience with ML
- Previous TL experience
#LI-Hybrid
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
$251,000—$310,000 USD
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
LLM
Rare in Waymo's other 278 open postings.
77% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Waymo's standard text, folded away below.
Compared with Waymo's other open jobs.
The team: Simulation (7XW) HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 30 open in Simulation (7XW). 3 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in January: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
C++ (26 of 30), Python (23 of 30), Machine Learning (19 of 30), SQL (13 of 30), Deep Learning (8 of 30), PyTorch (8 of 30), TensorFlow (7 of 30)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Senior Staff Technical Lead, Simulator Platform Horizontal Integrations posted Oct 22
- Staff Software Engineer, TLM, Quantitative Evaluations posted Oct 6
- Senior Software Engineer, Eval Efficiency & Optimization posted Oct 2
- Staff Tech Lead Software Engineer, Vehicle Realism Platform posted Sep 18
- Staff Tech Lead Manager, Machine Learning, Simulator Evaluation posted Sep 17
- Senior Data Scientist, Simulation Capacity Optimization posted Aug 31
- Staff Software Engineer (TLM), Field Response posted Jul 20
- Sr. Staff Software Engineer, DUE Experience posted Jul 15
- Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Simulation posted Jul 13
- Senior Staff Engineer, Agentic AI Engineering posted Jul 9
- Staff Software Engineer - Simulation Realism posted Jun 30
- Staff ML Engineer, Generative Model Performance & Efficiency posted Jun 29
- Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Simulation Realism posted Jun 26
- Staff Software Engineer, DUE Experience posted Jun 22
- Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Simulation Evaluation posted Jun 13
- Senior Software Engineer, ML/Eval Data Platforms & Infrastructure posted Jun 9
- Senior Software Engineer, Simulator Orchestration posted Jun 3
- Staff Software Engineer, Quantitative Evaluations posted May 27
- Senior Software Engineer, Eval Authoring APIs posted Mar 25
- Tech Lead Manager, Backend posted Jan 17
- Technical Lead Manager, Multiverse posted Jan 15
- Senior Software Engineer, Quantitative Evaluations posted Dec 18
- Staff Technical Lead Manager, Simulation, Machine Learning posted Dec 18
- Senior Staff TLM, Data Mining and Sampling for ML and Evaluation posted Dec 12
- Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Infrastructure posted Dec 8
- Senior Software Engineer - Multiverse posted Apr 7
- Machine Learning Engineer, Simulation posted Mar 13
- Senior/Staff ML Engineer, 3D/4D World Modeling, Simulation posted Mar 6
- Machine Learning Engineer, Simulation Realism posted Jan 23
From the team and dates on Waymo's own job board.
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