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Field Safety Engineer
Waymo
About the Role
This role focuses on building Waymo’s offboard Field Safety monitoring capabilities to ensure the continued safety of Waymo’s vehicles as operations expand. The position involves analyzing events and issues affecting autonomous vehicles, designing and building proactive, offboard field monitors using Waymo's latest AI tools, and transitioning academic theory into real-world autonomous fleet safety at scale. This role follows a hybrid work schedule.
Key Responsibilities
- Participate in investigations into driverless events, employee safety concerns, and other potential issues that could pose risks to the safety of Waymo vehicles, analyzing field data to identify trends.
- Identify opportunities for further offboard field monitoring, then design and build your own monitors, making use of Waymo's latest available AI tools.
Requirements & Tech Stack
- Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
- Hands-on experience developing software for data analysis, system modeling, or simulation.
- Demonstrated ability to independently write clean, maintainable, and well-documented code (e.g., Python, C++) to build reusable data analysis tools that anticipate the next technical question.
- Solid grasp of one (and, ideally, multiple) fundamental areas relevant to autonomous vehicle safety including physical system modeling, control theory, vehicle dynamics, sensing, perception, planning, behavior prediction, and machine learning.
- Natural curiosity to explore novel ways of leveraging data to rapidly answer safety questions arising from field events.
- Eagerness to network internally and build relationships across diverse engineering teams to trace issues and collect data.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Qualifications (Preferred)
- Software experience in autonomy or machine learning.
- Familiarity with statistical data analysis, quantitative risk assessment, or reliability engineering.
- Experience working with large-scale datasets, database querying (SQL-like), or building interactive offboard data dashboards.