Software Engineer, Sensor/Imaging

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.

Hardware Engineering is an innovative and collaborative group of electrical, mechanical, reliability, software and vehicle engineers. We design, build, and perfect the products which are the eyes and ears of Waymo's autonomous driving technology, and integrate those products into vehicle platforms. We're seeking curious and talented teammates to keep us moving in the right direction.

This role follows a hybrid work schedule, and you will report to the Tech Lead Manager of the Sensor Software Team.

You will:

• Report into Sensor organization


• Collaborate closely with multidisciplinary teams—including Sensor, Signal Processing, Perception, and System Engineering—to drive hardware/software co-optimization, providing concrete data and analysis across guide design trade-offs and component selection


• Automate processing, analysis, reporting, and visualization of image data collected from lab setups and self-driving vehicles to enable fast, data-driven decisions on image quality tuning and system performance


• Understand and evaluate internal and external quantitative image quality metrics, and apply them to guide improvements in sensor and ISP for downstream machine learning tasks


• Design comprehensive Image Quality (IQ) test plans for new camera hardware and ISP (Image Signal Processor) pipeline, covering standard metrics and machine learning-specific criteria


• Investigate and debug complex image quality issues, artifacts, and data anomalies across the entire imaging pipeline, from sensor physics through to machine learning inference

You have:

• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Math, or Physics (MS or PhD preferred for Math and Physics majors)


• 5 years experience in production code software development in a complex, multiple team environment


• Expertise in C++ and familiarity with Python


• Familiarity with image signal processing SW and HW

We prefer:

• Familiarity with the fundamentals of CMOS imaging sensors


• Experience with image quality evaluation for both human visual perception and machine learning performance


• Hands-on experience with computational imaging or computer vision


• Familiarity with SQL or NoSQL databases for querying and analyzing large datasets of test results and vehicle logs


• Experience with sensor testing and calibration procedures used in the sensor module manufacturing process


• Familiarity with self-driving technology