Senior Staff Engineer, Agentic AI Engineering
Waymo is hiring a Senior Staff Engineer, Agentic AI Engineering in Mountain View and San Francisco, United States. It pays $251k-$310k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Waymo.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this AI engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The listed pay starts 38% above the typical AI engineer posting on Level.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include LLMs, Python and LLM integration.
- Level classifies it as a lead role.
- Level lists 365 other open roles at Waymo.
AI in this role
Designs and deploys production-grade agentic AI systems and automated evaluation frameworks to scale autonomous driving technology.
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 core business scale is bottlenecked by improving long tail behaviors. The growth in vehicles, platforms, geos (e.g. international), and ODD (e.g. weather) creates a huge set of new problems that we have to solve quickly. The methodical process of building driving sets and high quality metrics cannot scale to Waymo's upcoming needs. We are looking for a senior IC to redefine the way we hillclimb and build eval to scale the Waymo driver.
In this hybrid role, you will report to an Engineering Director.
You will:
- Design, build, and deploy production-grade agentic AI systems to solve complex, open-ended evaluation challenges.
- Develop robust, automated evaluation frameworks and objective metrics to continuously measure the accuracy, safety, and reliability of non-deterministic AI agents.
- Automate the building and scaling of the hardest eval problem inhibiting Waymo's scale.
You have:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Proven technical leader with a track record of designing, building, evaluating, and deploying novel agent-based AI solutions into production
- Deep expertise in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, with heavy, hands-on experience building autonomous agents, multi-agent orchestration systems, and integrating LLMs with external tools/APIs.
- Extensive experience (typically 7+ years) in software engineering, with a significant focus on architecting and building large-scale, complex systems.
- Proven ability to define technical strategy, influence senior leadership, and drive execution across multiple teams in ambiguous and rapidly evolving domains.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
We prefer:
- PhD in Computer Science or a related field, with a specialization in AI/ML or a related area.
- Experience with agentic frameworks, knowledge graphs, and reasoning engines.
Proficiency in C++ and experience with building production-grade services. - Familiarity with autonomous vehicle simulation, testing, or evaluation domains.
- Familiarity with Google's or Waymo's internal AI/ML platforms and infrastructure.
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$251,000—$310,000 USDHow we rate this
Senior Staff Engineer, Agentic AI Engineering at Waymo rates 95 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in AI engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $251k
- Typical AI engineer job
- $182k
This posting starts 38% above the typical AI engineer job. See AI engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How have you integrated a large language model into a production application?
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Tell me about a project where agentic ai was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where autonomous agents was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: LLM Integration, AI agents, Agentic AI, Autonomous Agents, and Machine learning. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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