Senior Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Lead
About this role
Waymo builds the Waymo Driver, an autonomous driving technology system designed to power fully autonomous ride-hail services and multiple vehicle platforms across public roads and simulation environments. This position functions as an SRE Uber Tech Lead focused on the reliability, performance, and resilience of critical commercialization services and planet-scale software delivery systems that support a growing fleet of autonomous vehicles. The incoming engineer will lead strategy and execution for observability, capacity planning, incident management, and continuous system improvement while partnering directly with software teams to enhance system robustness.
Candidates stepping into this role will handle complex distributed infrastructure challenges, spearhead investigations into rare operational events, and champion reliability standards across the organization. Ideal applicants bring extensive experience managing large-scale production environments and possess the technical depth to guide software architecture improvements while collaborating closely with multidisciplinary engineering teams.
What you will do
- Drive incident response processes, retrospectives, and continuous improvement initiatives to prevent recurring operational issues.
- Organize and participate in on-call rotations for release-oriented outages alongside disaster recovery planning and business continuity efforts.
- Harden software systems, develop operational playbooks, and improve metrics and post-mitigation workflows to support critical release processes.
- Lead engineering analysis and responses to novel, rare, or unexpected events encountered during the development and analysis cycle.
- Champion a culture of reliability engineering by partnering with organization leads across onboard, evaluation, and simulator teams to improve large-scale software engineering practices.
- Contribute directly to system software architecture to enhance overall robustness and debuggability.
What you need
- Hold a Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Bring 15 or more years of experience working on large-scale production software systems, particularly machine learned systems.
- Demonstrate 15 or more years of hands-on coding experience utilizing C++.
- Possess experience organizing and running technical on-call rotations.
- Exhibit deep expertise in architecting large-scale distributed systems, observability tools, monitoring systems, and incident management practices.
- Show proficiency with automation, infrastructure, and modern DevOps and site reliability engineering tooling.
Nice to have
- 15+ years of experience leading hybrid hardware/software production systems
- Experience leading teams who work on modern deep ML / large scale models
- Track record of bringing about change in 1000+ person engineering organizations
Benefits
- Discretionary annual bonus program
- Equity incentive plan
- Company benefits program
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the work location policy for this position?
This is a hybrid role based out of Mountain View, California.
What is the expected salary range for the role?
The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is $298,000 to $368,000 USD, with actual starting pay based on job-related factors.
What additional compensation and benefits are available?
Employees are eligible to participate in a discretionary annual bonus program, an equity incentive plan, and a company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.
Who does this position report to?
This role reports directly to the Head of Site Reliability Engineering.