Senior Software Engineer, Perception Future Sensing Platforms

The Perception team at Waymo builds technology that powers the Waymo Driver. 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 conduct research to address real-world problems and collaborate with research teams at Alphabet. We have access to millions of miles of driving data from a diverse set of sensors, enabling software engineers like you to develop multi-modal models and techniques at scale.

Our mission is to build a stable foundation for a high-level Perception pipeline and the overall self-driving system. We act as the crucial interface between Waymo's hardware teams and the rest of the self-driving engineering organization, defining sensor requirements, providing critical feedback to hardware teams, and abstracting away system complexities.

The Multi-Platform Team's purpose is to abstract away superfluous differences between various sensor hardware and encapsulate hardware-specific logic so that downstream Perception is as portable as possible. Our work allows a single parameterized Perception software stack to run on all sensor hardware platforms, to remain easily maintainable across N platforms with much less than N times the effort, and to rapidly adapt to new platforms. We bring up the overall Perception software stack on new sensor and vehicle platforms.

This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to a Technical Lead Manager.

You will:

• Work with a creative team of people who are responsible for the bring-up of Perception SW on new hardware platforms (vehicles, sensors, compute).
• Evolve existing SW to abstract away superfluous differences between various sensor hardware and encapsulate hardware-specific logic, by writing design docs, gathering feedback, implementing the change and testing it and monitoring its continued health and maintaining it during its lifespan.
• Rapidly prototype and run de-risking experiments for the next-generation Perception SW stack that is designed to be more portable to the new sensor HW.
• Maintain and run evaluations of existing or hypothetical new sensor hardware to help make decisions on sensor HW options. Write up analyses that summarize high-level recommendations using the evidence from these evaluations.

• BS in Computer Science, Robotics, similar technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience
• Strong experience programming in C++  with robust and efficient code
• Strong software architecture skills
• Experience with sensor data processing (Lidar, camera, or Radar)
• Experience with building, integrating, debugging and evaluating ML-based systems

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, similar technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience with autonomous vehicles (L4) or ADAS systems (L2/L3)
• Experience with bring-up of new sensors or vehicle platforms