Senior Staff Data Scientist, TLM

Rigorous behavioral evaluation of the Waymo Driver is a critical part of scaling our ride hailing service and achieving Waymo’s ambitious goals. In this role, you will lead a specialized data science team tasked with providing early insights into the behavioral performance (safety, progress, quality) for new hardware platforms and new territories, helping to ensure Waymo can achieve targeted behavioral improvements while maintaining the requisite strict safety standard. In addition to providing insights, this team develops and deploys statistical and testing methodologies to bolster the rigor and actionability of our eval for all users. You and your team will work closely with the Onboard engineering team developing the Waymo Driver to ensure they have the evaluation tools to effectively iterate and improve behavior across a wide range of driving contexts.

In this hybrid role you will report to the DS Lead for Onboard Behavioral Evaluation.

You will:

• Lead a roadmap to develop efficient and opinionated evaluation of behavioral performance in any new territory and on any new vehicle platform. Ensure that this methodology can sustainably grow as Waymo’s deployment scope expands, while retaining the expected level of rigor and detail.
• Define and uphold a high bar for evaluation rigor. Be a gatekeeper ensuring that we can confidently rely on the evaluation signals informing early readiness decisions. Identify and work to resolve any gaps where current evaluation signals are not providing the necessary actionability for stakeholders.
• Develop and adapt our evaluation framework to accommodate a rapidly evolving collection of new territories and new hardware platforms.
• Leverage behavioral evaluation tools to provide rapid actionable feedback on behavioral performance in new territories and hardware platforms, playing a key role in the release readiness process. Communicate these findings to senior stakeholders.
• Collaborate with leads in product, engineering, and data science to align on roadmaps to unlock key Waymo deployment milestones and collaborate when there are codependencies. Be an opinionated partner informing roadmaps for onboard development work to unblock future expansions.
• Become an expert in the behavioral software underlying the Waymo Driver, including large-scale ML models, and act as an approver on behavioral software changes.
• Be an active technical contributor on the team, as well as a technical lead and/or manager to several data scientists. Frame and solve ambiguous problems by scoping technical priorities and innovating on statistical methods. Champion data science excellence and provide constructive technical feedback within the team and across Waymo.

You have:

• Degree in a quantitative field (e.g. Statistics, Mathematics, Physics)
• Either a PhD in a quantitative field and 7+ years of industry experience, or 9+ years of industry experience solving data science problems.
• Experience as the technical lead for a broad data science area.
• Expertise using advanced statistical methods in an applied setting; familiarity with ML systems/models
• Demonstrated knowledge of data analysis libraries and packages in Python, R, and/or SQL.

We prefer:

• PhD in a quantitative field
• A demonstrated track record of independently driving data science projects to deliver business value
• Experience solving problems related to Autonomous Driving or Ride Hailing.
• Experience with large-scale evaluation frameworks for software development.
• Experience in adjacent relevant areas like Advanced Machine Learning (Deep Learning and Diffusion models), Traffic Modeling, Safety Evaluation or Prediction