Waymo interview notes, page 9 of 9

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·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.”

View Post

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.”

View Post

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.”

View Post

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.”

View Post

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.”

View Post

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.”

View Post

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.”

View Post