Waymo

Large Enterprises

Most of these Waymo write-ups come from Software Engineers (46), then Machine Learning Engineers (23) and Data Scientists (10). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (58), the system design round (11), the behavioral / leadership round (6) and the hiring manager screen (4).

87 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Waymo·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Waymo data science interview with a meaty stats/ML problem centered on trajectory analysis. The whole session was basically one long case question with a follow-up baked in. Felt more like a research discussion than a traditional interview.

You have drone-captured 2D turning trajectories from vehicles at multiple intersections, some from Waymo autonomous vehicles and some from others. How would you statistically test whether Waymo's turning behavior is meaningfully different from the rest of the population? Walk through your feature choices, distributional assumptions, test selection, and how you'd report effect size.
Traffic volume and driving patterns vary across intersections. How do you prevent intersection-level confounding from distorting your Waymo vs. other vehicles comparison, and what modeling approach would you use?

“This is a deceptively open question.”

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Waymo·Frontend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Waymo frontend round where they handed me a single React problem and just... let me sit with it. The prompt was deliberately vague and the whole thing felt more like a design conversation than a coding test.

Build a simplified single-player Battleship board in React with click-to-cycle cell states and a status panel that tracks which ships are sunk.
How would you structure the React components for the grid and the ship status panel, and where should state live?
How does your click handler update a cell's state correctly even under rapid successive clicks?
How would you handle edge cases like overlapping ship coordinates, repeated clicks cycling back to empty, and resetting the board?
If the grid scaled to 1000x1000, what would you change about rendering and sunk-detection to keep it performant?
How would you test this component, and which parts deserve pure unit tests versus rendered component tests?

“The thing that tripped me up first was state modeling.”

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Waymo·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Waymo data scientist interview with two pretty distinct sections: one on K-means from scratch and one on multi-agent trajectory prediction that got pretty deep into transformer architectures and training-inference mismatch. The ML modeling half felt more like a research discussion than a standard DS interview.

Explain what objective K-means optimizes and walk through how the alternating optimization procedure works.
Implement K-means (Lloyd's algorithm) from scratch, including centroid initialization, the assignment and update steps, and a stopping condition.
Describe and implement a better centroid initialization strategy than random initialization.
Propose an ML approach to predict the next 2 positions of a target vehicle given its past trajectory, nearby agent trajectories, and map context. Cover input representation, architecture, output parameterization, and loss/metrics.
Explain what multi-head attention is doing in the context of multi-agent trajectory prediction and why it's useful there.
During autoregressive decoding, the model sees ground-truth previous steps at training time but its own (potentially wrong) predictions at inference time. How would you fix this mismatch, and what are the tradeoffs of different approaches?

“Pretty standard setup question but I fumbled the formal objective a bit.”

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Waymo·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Waymo software engineer interview with a tree serialization problem that I did not handle well. Ran out of time before finishing even the basic case, never mind edge cases. Not my best 45 minutes.

Given a syntax tree where each node is either a variable or one of the four basic operators (+, -, *, /), serialize the tree into a string using the minimum number of parentheses needed.

“This wrecked me.”

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Waymo·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

Jul 2026

Waymo HM screen for a software engineer role, no technical questions at all, just a career walkthrough and some light probing on annotation concepts. The HM was genuinely engaging and spent a good chunk of time pitching the team's self-driving work, which made the rejection feel like a gut punch when it finally came through after I had to chase the recruiter for an update.

Walk me through your background and the tech stack you've worked with.
Tell me about a project you owned end to end and delivered.
What's the difference between annotation and labeling in the context of machine learning data pipelines?

“Standard opener, I had rehearsed this with a coach so it went fine.”

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Waymo·Product Manager·Recruiter / HR Screen

Jul 2026

Interviewed for a PM role at Waymo. Not much to report, it was basically just an intro screen.

Can you walk me through your background and what you've been working on?

“Pretty standard opener.”

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Waymo·Product Manager·Hiring Manager Screen

Jul 2026

Short product sense screen at Waymo, just one question but it felt like they wanted to see how you think about real products, not just frameworks.

Pick a website you use regularly. How would you improve it?

“I went with Google Maps because I use it constantly and figured I'd have a lot to say.”

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Waymo·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Waymo ML Engineer interview that came down to a classic string problem, but they pushed through all three solution tiers which made it feel more like a depth check than a coding warmup.

Given a string, find the longest palindromic substring. Walk through your approaches from brute force to optimal, and explain the trade-offs at each step.

“Started with the O(N^3) brute force just to show I wasn't going to skip steps, then moved to expand-around-center which got me to O(N^2) with constant space.”

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Waymo·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026

Waymo PM interview with a product strategy question about expanding a simulation tool to a new market. Not a lot of behavioral fluff, just one meaty scenario that required thinking through logistics, localization, and stakeholder alignment all at once.

How would you approach launching a simulation tool in a new geographic locale?

“I went straight to market sizing and realized pretty quickly that was the wrong entry point for a simulation tool.”

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Waymo·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Waymo SWE interview with a string manipulation problem. Pretty standard coding round, nothing too wild, but the question had a specific approach they seemed to want.

Given two strings, one defining a custom character ordering and one as the target, rearrange the target string so its characters appear in the order defined by the first string. Characters not present in the ordering string can go anywhere.

“The core idea clicks pretty fast: count frequencies in the target, then walk through the ordering string and append each character the right number of times, then tack on whatever's left.”

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Waymo interview FAQ

What rounds are in the Waymo interview?

Candidates most often report a technical phone screen (58 write-ups), a system design round (11), a behavioral / leadership round (6) and a hiring manager screen (4).

What does the Waymo technical phone screen cover?

Across 58 technical phone screen write-ups, the most tagged question topics are Technical Trade-offs (74 questions), Algorithms & Data Structures (62) and System Design (28).

What is asked in the Waymo system design round?

Across 11 system design write-ups, the most tagged question topics are System Design (18 questions), Technical Trade-offs (18) and Data Modeling (5).