Tech Lead Manager- Onboard Software Performance
- Salary
- $238,000 - $302,000
- Level
- Lead
- 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.
Onboard Software Performance team ensures that systems running on ADV (Autonomously Driven Vehicle) meet strict performance requirements such as producing necessary outputs within strict latency targets and using an appropriately allocated amount of compute resources (CPU/GPU/TPU/RAM etc) for each respective submodule. All of this needs to be done at scale with performance guarantees of many 9s of reliability while enabling high velocity of system evolution.
In this hybrid role, you will report to a Senior Staff Engineer, Technical Lead Manager.
You will:
- Develop ADV's modular architecture improvements and frameworks that maximize performance and compute utilization and ROI for driving quality
- Evolve our compute usage on the car and simulation to enable continued scaling where the system runs fast on the car and efficiently in our data center
- Collaborating with onboard teams to identify and improve compute performance bottlenecks across the stack to improve performance/driving quality
- Collaborating with hardware teams to codesign hardware/software and optimize the software for best performance on our hardware platform
- Ensuring our performance is strong at any driving complexity including as we scale to even more complex driving environments and encounter rarer events
- Ensuring state of the art reaction latency for collision avoidance via novel system/architecture designs and extremely fast nominal performance
- Developing necessary high scale performance evaluation, debugging and software change management processes
- Optimizing system resource usage to simulation at scale in Cloud datacenters: minimizing CPU utilization and latency, minimizing RAM consumption, intelligently determining which computations should happen on CPU, GPU, and TPU.
You have:
- BS/MS in Comp Sci, EE, Robotics, Physics, Math, or related field (or equivalent experience)
- 6 years of software engineering experience on large scale/high complexity system (supported by hundreds of engineers)
- 2 years of software management experience with at least 4 years in infrastructure/systems/performance domain optimizing end to end system for high performance metrics
- 4 years of experience acting as technical lead in performance/software infrastructure domain
- 4 years of experience in C++
- Define roadmap/portfolio of projects optimizing for end results overall across all aspects of the problem space
- Setup collaboration structures across team boundaries
We prefer:
- Experience in robotics
- Experience in low level optimization techniques, frameworks (SIMD/CUDA) and ML performance/frameworks
- Experience in large scale evaluation techniques/data science and building performance metrics/tooling
- Experience in large scale software re-architecture projects
#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
$238,000—$302,000 USD
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
CUDA
Rare in Waymo's other 190 open postings.
81% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Waymo's standard text, folded away below.
Read against Waymo's other open postings on this site.
The team: Sys Intel and Machine Lrng (SQT) HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 4 open in Sys Intel and Machine Lrng (SQT). 1 was posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in November: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
C++ (4 of 4), Machine Learning (3 of 4), CUDA (2 of 4)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Staff Tech Lead, ML Data Infrastructure and Inference Platform posted Sep 23
- Staff Software Engineer, Compute Reliability posted Jun 24
- Staff Software Engineer/ Tech Lead - Onboard Model Consolidation posted Jun 17
From the team and dates on Waymo's own job board.
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