Aimed at mid-level engineers with 6+ years in mission-critical systems who thrive in hybrid work settings and cross-functional collaboration.
Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.
Original posting from Waymo
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.
Waymo’s software reliability engineers (SRE) are responsible for the stable operation of Waymo’s fully autonomous systems and supporting infrastructure. As an SRE, you combine software and systems engineering techniques to build and run large-scale, fault-tolerant, reliable systems. You focus on optimizing existing systems, building new infrastructure, eliminating manual, error-prone or time-consuming work through automation, and ensuring products that are fast, efficient, and effective.
This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to the Tech Lead Manager.
You will:
Become a Waymo production expert, and collaborate with other engineers to build reliable systems for autonomous vehicle operations, including depot logistics, automation flow, and critical vehicle state infrastructure
Manage end-to-end availability and performance for core fleet services, ensuring we have enough usable vehicle supply available to meet targeted user demand, and developing observability and automation to support this goal
Involvement in the whole lifecycle of services - from inception and design, through deployment, operation and refinement
Write designs and implement software to improve system architecture, telemetry or deployment for fleet-specific mission-critical services, preventing outages that could hinder vehicle launch or maintenance
Write designs and code software/automation for global infrastructure
Serve as the first responder for fleet and supply infrastructure by leading incident response efforts. You’ll participate in a sustainable on-call rotation, while championing a culture of blameless retrospectives to drive continuous improvement
Be a technical leader -- work with SREs, SWE partners and PMs to develop and set the technical direction and architectural guidelines for Waymo's software development
You have:
6+ years of experience architecting and maintaining mission-critical systems in C++, Java, or Python
Proven ability to conduct deep-dive performance profiling and lead large-scale refactoring efforts to improve system maintainability and latency
Demonstrated success managing massive distributed systems and a drive to solve the unique production engineering challenges found at the intersection of software and physical vehicle fleets
A proven track record defining SLIs/SLOs/SLA frameworks. Experience designing and deploying observability systems to enhancing system visibility and reliability through sophisticated monitoring aligned to critical service health and the CUJ needs of users, devs and SREs
Demonstrated experience leading cross-functional initiatives between Engineering and Dev
A history of mentoring junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of operational excellence, and driving technical roadmap decisions for a high-growth department
A Bachelors degree in a relevant field or 8+ years similar experience in a high growth environment with leadership experience
We prefer:
Demonstrated engineering leadership ability of a mission critical system at scale
A demonstrated track record of translating reliability needs into technical roadmaps and rigorous, data-driven SLO frameworks.
Proven ability to lead deep-dive architectural investigations and resolve complex, high-impact system failures across the stack
A Bachelors of Computer Science (or similar)
Source: Waymo careers