Waymo Software Engineer Interview Guide

The most noticeable part of the Waymo interview was that the coding work felt closer to a real application scenario than a standard LeetCode prompt. I was expected to drive the discussion myself, especially with interviewers who were fairly quiet, rather than waiting for hints or a highly interactive back-and-forth. A key expectation was explaining the tradeoffs in my solution: I needed to state the pros and cons, not just arrive at working code.

The technical questions were described as medium-to-hard in difficulty, with emphasis on practical problem solving. Grid traversal and simulation-style problems seemed particularly relevant, such as navigating a car through a 2D grid with circular obstacles or tracing a ball through a grid with diagonal barriers. Other examples included implementing a basic calculator and maintaining segment-based average speeds while supporting add, remove, and query operations. These questions test BFS/DFS, interval handling, grid traversal, and the ability to structure an implementation cleanly under interview conditions.

I also found it important to know the standard function names in the language I was using, since that was an expected baseline. Overall, I would go in prepared to communicate proactively, explain why one approach is preferable to another, and treat the coding round as an applied engineering problem rather than relying only on memorized LeetCode patterns. I did not receive an offer.