Tech Lead Manager, Backend

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 RO Performance team is at the heart of understanding and improving Waymo's self-driving technology. We build and maintain the critical infrastructure, to process and analyze vast amounts of data from both real-world driving logs and simulations. Our systems generate key metrics and power dashboards which are essential for tracking the product performance, identifying areas for improvement, and making data-driven decisions. The insights produced by our team directly influence Waymo's operational rollouts, weekly performance reviews, and ultimately, the safety and reliability of our autonomous vehicles.

In this hybrid role, you will report to an Staff Software Engineer.

You will:

• Technical Leadership & Strategy: Define the roadmap for high-performance, low-latency pipelines that bridge massive-scale simulation with real-world monitoring.


• Team Management & Mentorship: Grow and develop a team of engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, code health, and continuous learning.


• Evaluation & Fidelity Oversight: Drive the scientific rigor behind our "virtual driver's test," ensuring simulation signals are highly predictive of real-world behavior.


• ML & Innovation: Lead the integration of advanced ML models to identify high-value driving scenarios, optimizing testing efficiency through large-scale model deployment.


• Operational Excellence: Ensure the long-term stability and health of production systems while championing developer experience and best-in-class software practices.


• Cross-Functional Influence: Partner with Data Science and Systems Engineering leads to translate complex vehicle telemetry into high-level strategic insights.

You have:

• 5+ years of full-time software engineering experience (or a quantitative PhD with 2+ years of professional SWE experience).


• Experience managing small teams


• Advanced command of C++ (or another OOP language) with functional familiarity in Python and SQL.


• A deep interest in autonomous driving, simulation-based evaluation, and large-scale data systems.


• Excited about autonomous driving, Simulation + Eval


• Strong verbal and written communication skills

We prefer:

• 7+ years of industry experience (or 3+ years post-doc) in building a large scale production system with its long term stability and health in mind.


• B.Sc., M.Sc. or PhD in Computer Science


• Experience working with large FAANG scale distributed systems.