Staff Software Engineer, DUE Experience
Waymo is hiring a Staff Software Engineer, DUE Experience in Mountain View, United States. It pays $251k-$310k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Waymo.
Level's read on this job
- On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The listed pay starts 50% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include LLM Orchestration Frameworks, RAG and Vector databases.
- Level classifies it as a senior role.
- Level lists 365 other open roles at Waymo.
AI in this role
Lead architectural design and development of advanced Agentic AI systems and LLM orchestration workflows for autonomous driving evaluation.
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.
The Driver Understanding and Evaluation (DUE) team at Waymo is developing rich metrics for understanding the behavior of the Waymo Driver in the real world, and technologies such as context and scene analysis to understand driving, understanding and augmenting real world driving data to generate rare driving events, build large scale data infrastructure, improve components such as agents and a realistic simulator. These technologies come together to drive the overall technical strategy and methodology used to evaluate the behavior of the Waymo Driver.
You will:
- Lead the architectural design and hands-on development of advanced Agentic AI systems, focusing on multi-agent orchestration, tool execution, and complex reasoning loops for event triage.
- Engineer scalable agentic workflows using modern LLM orchestration frameworks to fully automate and augment triage capabilities for Engineering and SWQOps.
- Design and deploy stateful agentic infrastructure, including long-term memory management (RAG, vector databases), semantic routing, and custom internal tool integrations.
- Collaborate with cross-functional partner teams to embed autonomous agents directly into the Waymo Driver evaluation lifecycle.
- Mentor engineers within DUE Experience on agentic development patterns, and prompt engineering
- Tackle broad, ambiguous automation problems by breaking them down into actionable multi-agent projects and leading the technical execution of the roadmap.
You have:
- Significant experience (typically 8+ years) in software engineering, with a focus on designing and building large-scale, complex distributed systems.
- Deep expertise in applied LLMs and Agentic AI development, with a proven track record of building multi-agent systems, reasoning engines, and autonomous workflows.
- Strong proficiency with agent orchestration frameworks and advanced prompt engineering.
- Proven ability to execute technical strategy, influence partner teams, and drive end-to-end development of AI-native applications in ambiguous domains.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to align cross-functional stakeholders on agentic concepts and system limitations.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
We prefer:
- Master's or PhD in Computer Science or a related field, with a specialization in AI/ML or a related area.
- Experience developing custom tools/plugins for agents, semantic routers, and implementing complex multi-agent collaborative patterns.
- Familiarity with autonomous vehicle simulation, testing, or evaluation domains.
- Proficiency in C++ and Python, with experience building production-grade microservices and pipelines.
- Experience working with large-scale data processing, knowledge graphs, and distributed systems.
- 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
Staff Software Engineer, DUE Experience at Waymo rates 90 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 software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $251k
- Typical software engineer job
- $167k
This posting starts 50% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you structure and test a prompt to get consistent output from a language model?
- How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
- 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 distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Prompt engineering, RAG, AI agents, Agentic AI, and Distributed Systems. 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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