Senior Staff Android Engineer, In-Car Experience

Employer description

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.

We are building a team of engineers dedicated to further developing our in-car experience (ICX). Projects span the complete in-cabin software stack, including rider-facing interfaces (Pick Ups and Drop Offs, 3D perception visualization, passenger infotainment), platform application infrastructure, and embedded vehicle bring-up. Our team works on the foundational software and user experiences used by passengers to hail and interact with our autonomous vehicles, solving novel human-computer interaction, systems reliability, and real-time distributed systems problems in the AV space.

In this hybrid role, you will report to an Engineering Director.

You will:

• Define and drive the overarching, multi-year technical vision and architecture across the entire in-car experience, bridging low-level vehicle/hardware bring-up, Android OS platform services, and rider-facing applications.

• Serve as the principal technical lead across multiple engineering teams (ICX, App Platform Infra, and UXC Bring-up), setting architectural direction and steering the integration of high-impact features such as real-time 3D perception views, passenger controls, and third-party app ecosystems.

• Lead from the front as a hands-on technical authority, actively conducting system design reviews, diagnosing complex low-level bottlenecks (e.g., AOSP/OS stability, graphics rendering performance, IPC latency), and establishing rigorous standards for code health and reliability.

• Champion Waymo's DevAI initiative within in-car engineering by driving the adoption of AI-native developer tooling, agentic workflows, and automated evaluation systems to radically improve team velocity and software quality.

• Partner cross-functionally with Product, UX, Systems Engineering, and Hardware teams to align technical trade-offs with product vision and translate complex requirements into clear, actionable technical roadmaps.

• Act as an organizational force multiplier by mentoring senior engineers and tech leads, fostering technical excellence, and driving consensus across complex, multi-system initiatives.

You have:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of setting strategic technical direction and delivering complex, large-scale systems as a senior technical lead (L6/L7 equivalent).

• Deep technical expertise spanning Android/AOSP platform development (system services, HAL, IPC/Binder, C++ native layers), with proven experience building core OS and framework capabilities beyond standard application-layer development.

• Extensive experience with modern client architecture, systems programming, and modern UI frameworks (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose), as well as complementary distributed backend systems.

• Strong system design expertise with a demonstrated ability to decouple monolithic architectures, design reusable platform infrastructure, and optimize for resource-constrained onboard hardware environments.

• Demonstrated leadership in developer productivity and AI-native workflows, with practical experience integrating DevAI tools, LLMs, or agentic systems to accelerate software development lifecycles.

We prefer:

• Master’s or PhD degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.

• Experience with automotive software environments, Android Automotive OS (AAOS), or vehicle hardware integration.

• Proven track record designing and maintaining extensible application frameworks and SDKs for third-party developer ecosystems.

• Experience with hardware-accelerated graphics pipelines (OpenGL ES, Vulkan), display composers, or real-time 3D rendering.

• Experience operating in safety-critical, high-reliability, or low-latency systems.

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.