Onboard Software Performance Engineer (C++)
Company websitewaymo.com (Waymo, opens in new tab)
Base salary $175K to $215K
Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in Mountain View, CA
You apply on the employer's own site. Six Figure Work does not handle applications.
- LocationMountain View, CA
- WorkplaceWorkplace not stated
- Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
- Last checked (45 min ago) · observed since
About this job
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 Onboard Software Performance team ensures that systems running on our Waymo's meet strict performance requirements such as producing necessary outputs within strict latency targets and using the allocated amount of compute resources (CPU/GPU/TPU/RAM) for each respective submodule. All of this needs to be done at scale with performance guarantees of many 9s of reliability while promoting high velocity of system evolution.
You will:
- Develop ADV's modular architecture improvements and frameworks that maximize performance and compute use and ROI for driving quality
- Evolve our compute usage on the car and simulation to promote continued scaling where the system runs fast on the car and in our data center
- Collaborate with onboard teams to identify and improve compute performance bottlenecks across the stack to improve performance/driving quality
- Collaborate with hardware teams to codesign hardware/software and improve the software for best performance on our hardware platform
- Ensure reaction latency for collision avoidance with and help design novel system/architecture for extremely fast nominal performance
- Develop necessary high scale performance evaluation, debugging and software change management processes
- Improve system resource usage to simulation at scale in Cloud datacenters: minimizing CPU use and latency, minimizing RAM usage, intelligently determining which computations should happen on CPU, GPU, and TPU.
You have:
- BS in Comp Sci, EE, Robotics, Physics, Math, or related field (or equivalent experience)
- 3 years of experience as a software engineer or similar roles
- 3 years of experience in C++
- 3 year of experience optimizing software using profile guided techniques
We prefer:
- 2 years in infrastructure/systems/performance domain optimizing end-to-end systems
- 2 years of experience working on a large-scale/high complexity system (supported by hundreds of engineers)
- Experience in robotics
- Experience in low-level optimization techniques, frameworks (SIMD/CUDA) and ML performance/frameworks
- Experience in evaluation techniques
#LI-Hybrid
This is a hybrid remote/in-office role.
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
$175,000—$215,000 USD
Source: Waymo on Greenhouse · View original posting (opens in new tab)
Pay in context
This role's base floor ($175,000) is above 48% of the 4,307 Software Engineering roles in California listed on this site; 55 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $176,000; the middle half runs from $149,100 to $202,500.
Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 7, 2026.
This listingOnboard Software Performance Engineer (C++)$175K to $215K
Machine Learning Engineer, Driver Refinement & Validation, Perception$175K to $215K
Machine Learning Engineer, Prediction & Planning$175K to $215K
Silicon Emulation Engineer$175K to $215K
Perception Machine Learning Engineer - Continuous Learning$175K to $215K
Software Engineer, Marketplace Logistic$175K to $215K
Machine Learning Engineer, Marketplace Pricing$175K to $215K
Chart as a table
| Role | Published base |
|---|---|
| Onboard Software Performance Engineer (C++) (this listing) | $175K - $215K |
| Machine Learning Engineer, Driver Refinement & Validation, Perception | $175K - $215K |
| Machine Learning Engineer, Prediction & Planning | $175K - $215K |
| Silicon Emulation Engineer | $175K - $215K |
| Perception Machine Learning Engineer - Continuous Learning | $175K - $215K |
| Software Engineer, Marketplace Logistic | $175K - $215K |
| Machine Learning Engineer, Marketplace Pricing | $175K - $215K |
Observed changes
- First observed on the employer's board
- Began meeting the published-salary criteria
- Observed since
- Employer-stated posting date
- 2025-11-11
Where this pay comes from
Location as the employer wrote it: Mountain View, California
$175,000—$215,000 USD
- Method
- Employer text, read with fixed rules and re-verified
- Checked
- Rule set
- us-base-v2
The pay passage appears in the employer's own job text. Fixed, deterministic rules located it, and the passage below was checked against the stored copy of the posting.
What we verified
- The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
- The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
- The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.
We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.
