About the job
Waymo LLC develops autonomous driving technology, building on its origins as the Google Self-Driving Car Project. The Waymo Driver, at the core of its ride-hailing service, has completed over ten million rides and driven more than 100 million miles on public roads, plus tens of billions of miles in simulation across 15+ U. S. states.
The Hardware Engineering team brings together electrical, mechanical, reliability, software, and vehicle engineers. This group designs and integrates the sensors and systems that enable Waymo's autonomous vehicles. The team values curiosity, technical skill, and collaboration.
This LiDAR Performance Validation Hardware Engineer role is based in Mountain View, CA, with a hybrid schedule (at least 3 days per week in office). The position reports to the LiDAR performance lead.
What You'll Do
- Work with electrical, mechanical, manufacturing, and reliability engineers to develop and characterize high-performance LiDAR systems and electro-optical subsystems.
- Develop bench characterization methods and physics-based software models to confirm designs meet performance goals. Create and maintain validation plans that follow the design lifecycle from prototype to mass production.
- Define and support testing and calibration procedures to ensure LiDAR data quality at scale. Collaborate with design and test teams to set up testing methodologies and performance acceptance criteria.
- Design and carry out LiDAR field measurements and structured tests. Assess how environmental conditions impact LiDAR performance, and create strategies to detect and resolve quality issues using experimental design, data mining, and analysis.
- Work closely with LiDAR software, perception software, and systems engineers to resolve field data quality issues and help define requirements that ensure the LiDAR module meets system-level performance and safety standards.
- Move between physics modeling, simulation, large-scale data analysis, and hands-on prototyping as needed.
