Software Quality Operations Specialist

Waymo • Mountain View, CA

84d • $170,000 - $216,000

About The Position

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 Software Quality Operations (SWQOPS) team is at the heart of ensuring the safety, reliability, and quality of the Waymo Driver. Our mission is to build an adaptable and scalable operation, increasingly powered by AI, to deliver the crucial insights necessary to confidently deploy and grow Waymo's autonomous vehicle service. Waymo is undergoing unprecedented growth, rapidly expanding into new cities (targeting 20 new cities by EOY2026) and launching new vehicle platforms SWQOps, especially our Technical Specialists, plays a critical role in this expansion, making it possible to scale safely and efficiently.

Requirements

• BS/BA degree or 4 years of relevant work experience in AV Software Quality Operations.
• Increased competency in supporting all phases of the machine learning development lifecycle, from data preparation and training to validation, deployment, and continuous monitoring.
• Experience with ML testing and validation, including dataset quality assurance, bias detection, edge-case scenario testing, and performance evaluation using statistical metrics.
• Ability to quickly learn and implement new concepts and utilize proprietary tools.
• Strong understanding of driving rules and regulations.

Nice To Haves

• Demonstrated strong execution with ability to drive outcomes.
• Experience working with offshore teams / multiple local operations hubs.
• Basic SQL querying.
• Competency in LLM / transformer models, and / or ML for robotics domain experience.
• A greater focus on using your subject matter expertise for results analysis and direct customer consultation in the development of new and improved solutions.
• Self-motivated with basic skills in task planning and time management.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Engineering to design, test, and deploy cutting-edge Machine Learning (ML) and Generative AI (Gen-AI) models and tools to drive step-change improvements in issue discovery & detection, triage efficiency, and quality assurance.
• Leverage AI-powered insights and traditional triage signals to proactively identify emerging on-road issue trends, new risk scenarios, and edge cases.
• Develop and refine data-driven strategies for issue discovery and monitoring, enhanced by ML model outputs.
• Serve as the key link between AI/ML development and operational execution.
• Define and document new policies, guidelines, and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that integrate AI tools and insights into daily vendor workflows.
• Design and implement robust quality control processes for both human and AI-generated outputs.
• Perform meta-quality checks, validate the integrity of vendor work, and provide feedback to improve both human and model performance.
• Act as the subject matter expert for our Software Quality Operations, working closely with stakeholders, program leads, and vendor teams to ensure seamless adoption and maximum impact of AI/ML advancements in our quality processes.
• Provide technical leadership and consultation to stakeholders to enhance our workflows and quality.
• Identify and escalate issues with our tools, providing technical requirements to engineering, and driving user testing to support the development and deployment of new tooling features.

Benefits

• Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program.
• Equity incentive plan.
• Generous Company benefits program.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: Bachelor's degree
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees