Staff Site Reliability Engineer (Automotive)

Location: On site in Mountain View or San Francisco, California, United States. Once- or twice-yearly travel to the Bay Area is preferred but not required.

Salary: $251,000–$310,000 USD base salary per year, plus eligibility for an annual bonus, equity incentive plan, and company benefits.

Company

Waymo develops autonomous driving technology and operates a fully autonomous ride-hailing service powered by the Waymo Driver.

What you will do

• Build and operate reliable systems for autonomous vehicle operations, including depot logistics, automation flows, and critical vehicle-state infrastructure.
• Own end-to-end availability and performance for core fleet services and maintain sufficient usable vehicle supply for demand.
• Design and implement architecture, telemetry, deployment, observability, and automation improvements for mission-critical fleet services.
• Lead troubleshooting of complex reliability issues, technical debt management, incident response, and sustainable on-call operations.
• Set architectural guidelines and lead cross-functional initiatives that integrate projects into reusable components and services.
• Mentor engineers, develop leadership, and promote operational excellence through blameless retrospectives.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience architecting and maintaining mission-critical systems in C++, Java, or Python.
• Deep expertise in software reliability and resolving complex, high-impact system failures.
• Experience leading the reliability program of a complex system such as autonomous systems, cloud infrastructure, or a large-scale web service.
• Ability to develop and communicate strategy across organizations, influence key decisions, and lead Engineering–Development initiatives.
• Experience building team leadership through delegation, recruiting, and mentoring engineers.
• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field, or 10+ years of comparable experience in a high-growth environment with leadership experience.

Nice to have

• Experience leading multiple large projects or a mission-critical program from concept to delivery.
• Experience translating business needs into site reliability initiatives and managing technical debt and system evolution.
• Experience leading architectural investigations and resolving failures in distributed systems.
• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.

Culture & Benefits

• Participation in a sustainable on-call rotation with a focus on continuous improvement.
• Blameless retrospectives and operational excellence practices.
• Discretionary annual bonus program and equity incentive plan, subject to eligibility.
• Company benefits program, subject to eligibility.