Jobs / United States / Waymo LLC
Staff Data Scientist
Waymo LLC · 🇺🇸 Mountain View, California, USA; San Francisco, California, USA
Sponsorship verdict
Sponsorship possible
One solid signal, not two — worth applying, and worth asking about sponsorship early.
- Employer is on a government sponsor recordThe US Department of Labor certified 290 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 87 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- What Waymo LLC paid sponsored hires in similar roles19 certified filings for “Data Scientist” (Data Scientists) in CA: $197k–$230k, median $205k. Most were filed at wage level III (50%) — 3 lottery entries, ≈46% projected selection odds for cap-subject employers. Source: US Department of Labor LCA disclosure data (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026).
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
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Sponsor Radar — Waymo LLC
The US Department of Labor certified 290 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 87 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for Waymo LLC →
About the role
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. 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 key initiatives for measuring the quality and trustworthiness of the behavior evaluation portfolio at Waymo, continuously identify and drive opportunities for improving the evaluation and testing methodologies, and partner closely with product and engineering teams to develop scalable solutions for monitoring and enhancing the health of the evaluation ecosystem. You will play a key role to ensure the behavior evaluation at Waymo is efficient, scientifically rigorous, and supporting Waymo’s growth priorities. In this hybrid role you will report to a Data Science Lead. You will: • Lead a roadmap to develop methodologies and Key Performance Indicators to measure the quality, cost efficiency, and business relevance for various behavior evaluation solutions at Waymo. • Directly influence the portfolio of evaluation signals relied on by hundreds of software engineers to ensure their changes in the Waymo Driver are having positive intended impacts. • Conduct deep dive analysis to understand performance bottlenecks in current evaluation methodologies, propose and prototype improvements in metrics, sampling strategy, statistical inference, etc. • Become an expert in Waymo’s evaluation ecosystem for onboard software. Understand how a broad variety of evaluation signals affect Waymo’s launch decisions, develop strategies for evaluating trade-offs, and provide actionable insights for designing launch criteria. • Collaborate with product and engineering teams to build solutions for assessing Waymo’s evaluation portfolio at scale and accelerate the development for new evaluation. • Collaborate with owners of various evaluation solutions, develop feedback loops to surface insights on evaluation quality to stakeholders and drive actionable plans for continuous improvement. You have: • Degree in a quantitative field (e.g. Statistics, Mathematics, Physics) • Either a PhD in a quantitative field and 5+ years of industry experience, or 7+ years of industry experience solving data science problems • Solid statistical background. Expertise using advanced statistical methods in an applied setting (e.g., experimentation design, causal inference, etc); familiarity with ML systems/models • Demonstrated knowledge of data analysis libraries and packages in Python, R, and/or SQL • Strong communication/leadership to address a high surface area across different organizations and products • Ability to navigate through ambiguous business requirements and propose a clear technical solution We prefer: • PhD in a quantitative field • Experience developing production-grade software and tools • Experience as the technical lead for a broad data science area. A demonstrated track record of independently driving data science projects to deliver business value • Experience with large-scale evaluation frameworks or experimentation/data platform for software development and machine learning syste