Principal Software Engineer, Simulator

Software Engineering builds the brains of Waymo's fully autonomous driving technology. Our software allows the Waymo Driver to perceive the world around it, make the right decision for every situation, and deliver people safely to their destinations. We think deeply and solve complex technical challenges in areas like robotics, perception, decision-making and deep learning, while collaborating with hardware and systems engineers. If you're a software engineer or researcher who's curious and passionate about Level 4 autonomous driving, we'd like to meet you.

The Simulator Team at Waymo builds state-of-the-art simulations of realistic environments for evaluating, training and scaling 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), static road elements, traffic control systems, weather conditions, and the full sensor suite including camera, lidar and radars.

We enhance our simulations' fidelity, scalability, and controllability by leveraging modern machine learning. This includes large language models, foundational world models, and reconstructive methods, all trained on datasets using both generative and reconstructive AI, alongside traditional rendering techniques.

You will report to the Sr Director of Engineering and Head of the Simulator organization.

You will:

• Drive innovation in simulation for autonomous vehicles. You will develop the latest simulation technologies using 3D Gaussian Splatting, foundational models for sensor data generation and traditional 3D graphics techniques
• Lead the deployment and scaling of simulation to address Waymo's hardest challenges in a collaborative environment
• You will work with onboard representatives, systems engineering, data science and product to accelerate our goals using simulation and maximize impact
• Work in close collaboration with Waymo's foundational AI research team and ML Infra teams to transfer research into scalable and production-ready solutions
• Champion scientific and statistical rigor in embodied AI applications
• Ensure understanding within simulation on goals and priorities
• Independently manage the entire lifecycle of important product innovations, from prototyping to productization, scaling simulations and data processing systems

You have:

• Experience defining and implementing evaluation strategies
• Experience in Deep Learning or ML Infra
• 7+ years of experience leading and scaling large-scale ML and data systems
• Mastery of data-driven report writing and technical strategy documentation for executive decision-making
• Technical leadership experience including prior hands-on involvement with the development of large-scale AI or LLM systems

We prefer:

• Mentor and leadership development experience
• Experience shaping product roadmaps
• Expertise in creating large datasets

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