Sr. Staff Data Architect (Autonomous Driving)

Location: On site in Mountain View, California, or San Francisco, California

Salary: $298,000–$368,000 USD annual base salary, plus eligibility for an annual bonus, equity incentive plan, and company benefits.

Company

Waymo develops autonomous driving technology, including the Waymo Driver and fully autonomous ride-hail services.

What you will do

• Define and drive the global architectural roadmap for the Data Lake, transitioning ad hoc processing to a scalable analytical ecosystem.
• Lead cross-domain data pipeline architecture and maintain consistency across centralized infrastructure and embedded product domains.
• Establish linear DAG, Lakehouse, and Medallion architecture standards to improve data lineage and reduce coupling.
• Chair Data Design Reviews covering modular code, testing, DAG dependency registration, and environment-specific configuration.
• Architect self-service frameworks and managed pipeline services for Data Engineers and Product Data Scientists.
• Integrate privacy, access control, and compliance requirements, including GDPR and IAM/RBAC, into the platform architecture.

Requirements

• BS, MS, PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 12+ years of experience designing, implementing, and operating multi-petabyte data lake or data warehouse solutions in high-growth companies.
• Experience leading data governance and data platform maturity transitions from ad hoc to standardized systems.
• Experience guiding a data infrastructure organization through rapid growth while balancing analyst speed with governance controls.
• Expertise in distributed batch and streaming frameworks such as C++, Flume, Apache Spark, or Flink.
• Ability to influence and align hundreds of stakeholders, including Director-level leaders, embedded engineering, and data science teams.

Nice to have

• Hands-on knowledge of cloud-native or internal release-hardening ecosystems, CI/CD pipelines, and container orchestration.
• Proficiency with Google-internal pipeline and data stacks, including Flume, SQLP, Rapid, CAS, and F1.

Culture & Benefits

• On-site work in Mountain View or San Francisco.
• Eligibility for a discretionary annual bonus program.
• Equity incentive plan and company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.