Senior Data Scientist, Simulation Capacity Optimization

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.

Our Simulation team is at the heart of this mission, enabling us to safely and rapidly iterate on the Waymo Driver. We run billions of miles of simulations, creating a massive and complex demand for technical infrastructure resources (CPU, GPU, TPU, Storage).

We are establishing a new team called CORPIO (SimEval Capacity Operations, Resource Planning, Infrastructure Optimization). This team is tasked with building a critical capability for Waymo: data-driven, strategic capacity planning and resource optimization. We are looking for a Senior Data Scientist to bridge the gap between sophisticated mathematical modeling and production-scale infrastructure automation. You will be responsible for building the technical systems that forecast demand, optimize resource allocation, and automate infrastructure management, ensuring our simulation environment is both high-performance and cost-effective.

As a Senior Data Scientist on the CORPIO team, you will:

Infrastructure Modeling & Automation: Design and build production-grade systems and pipelines to automate capacity planning, demand management, and quota allocation.

Quantitative Forecasting: Implement and maintain sophisticated models for infrastructure demand forecasting, incorporating architectural shifts, peak loads, and time-shifting opportunities.

Resource Optimization Algorithms: Develop and deploy algorithms to optimize resource utilization across a heterogeneous fleet (CPU, GPU, TPU) and diverse supply models (on-demand vs. reserved).

Data Pipeline Engineering: Architect and maintain robust data pipelines that ingest infrastructure telemetry and demand driver signals to feed forecasting and optimization engines.

Outcome Analysis: Build systems to translate resource plans into tangible outcomes (e.g., queue lengths, user demand fulfillment) and develop attribution models for capacity imbalances.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Simulation, Infrastructure, and Finance teams to translate business requirements into technical specifications and automated solutions.

Technical Leadership: Provide technical guidance on the intersection of quantitative modeling and systems engineering, mentoring junior members and influencing the technical roadmap for CORPIO.

You have: 

Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field (e.g. Statistics, Mathematics, Physics) or equivalent practical experience.

5+ years of industry experience solving data science problems, or a PhD in a quantitative field and 3+ years of industry experience

Expertise using advanced statistical methods in an applied setting; familiarity with ML systems/models

Strong background in quantitative methods, such as optimization, statistical modeling, or time-series analysis.

Demonstrated knowledge of Python/SQL/R data analysis libraries and packages

We prefer:

PhD or Master's degree in a quantitative field 

Experience in Capacity Engineering or Infrastructure Optimization at scale.

Familiarity with ML-driven forecasting and optimization techniques.

Experience with financial modeling or cost-benefit analysis of technical infrastructure.

Experience building automation tools for resource management and quota allocation.

Knowledge of simulation workloads or high-performance computing (HPC) …