Field Safety Engineer

Waymo•Mountain View, CA

25d•Hybrid

About The Position

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company focused on building the Waymo Driver and improving access to mobility while reducing traffic fatalities. The Safety team promotes and continuously improves the safety of Waymo's fully autonomous driving technology through safety goals, strategies, and engineering analyses, and works with regulatory authorities, lawmakers, law enforcement, and public and nonprofit organizations. The Field Safety Engineer will help build Waymo’s offboard Field Safety monitoring capabilities as the company expands its operations. As part of the Field Safety team, the engineer will analyze events and issues affecting Waymo’s autonomous vehicles, then use insights from real-world issues to design and build proactive offboard field monitors using Waymo’s available AI tools. The role includes direct mentorship from Waymo’s Field Safety Architect and other safety leaders, helping translate academic theory into real-world autonomous fleet safety at scale. The role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to the Senior Director, Safety.

Requirements

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.
Ability to independently write clean, maintainable, well-documented code, such as Python or C++, to build reusable data analysis tools that anticipate future technical questions.
Solid grasp of at least one fundamental area relevant to autonomous vehicle safety, such as physical system modeling, control theory, vehicle dynamics, sensing, perception, planning, behavior prediction, or machine learning.
Curiosity about novel ways to leverage data to rapidly answer safety questions arising from field events.
Willingness to build relationships across diverse engineering teams to trace issues and collect data.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

Participate in investigations into driverless events, employee safety concerns, and other potential issues that could pose risks to Waymo vehicles.
Analyze field data to identify trends.
Identify opportunities for further offboard field monitoring.
Design and build offboard field monitors using Waymo’s available AI tools.