Is Waymo Hiring? 339 Open Roles, and Zero of Them Drive the Car (Sept. 21, 2026)

Yes — Waymo had 339 open roles on its own job board on September 21, 2026, nine more than last Monday. But if you searched this because you want to drive for Waymo, the honest answer is no: zero of those 339 are driving jobs. Five have the word “driver” in the title, and all five are engineers building the software that replaced the driver.

This is the Monday hiring report, so we count every board we track. This week the story of the whole market is sitting inside that one company: the jobs people search for and the jobs a company actually posts are two different lists. The search results for this question are ten job aggregators. The top one was titled “48 Open Positions” when we looked. Several others advertise “$14–$18/hr Waymo Driver” jobs. Neither number is on Waymo’s board.

Interior of a Waymo robotaxi with an empty driver seat — The job most people picture when they search “is Waymo hiring” is the empty seat in this picture. Waymo’s board has none. Photo: ajay_suresh, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

The short version

339 open roles on Waymo’s board (Sept. 21, 2026), up from 330. 37 new, 28 gone.
0 driving, cleaning or charging jobs. Those belong to Transdev, Moove and Avis.
17 of the 37 new Waymo postings were Summer 2027 internships.
Across all 19 boards we can read: 3,844 open roles, +49 on the week.

What Waymo is actually hiring for

We read Waymo’s public board every morning for the AI jobs tracker. Today we grouped all 339 postings by title. The board is a software company’s board. Engineering and machine learning make up more than half of it. Operations roles do exist, but they are managers and planners, not people working on the cars.

Bar chart of Waymo's 339 open roles by job type — All 339 postings on Waymo’s board on September 21, 2026, grouped by keywords in the job title. Our grouping, not Waymo’s department names.

The “driver” search is the finding that matters. The five titles are things like Senior Staff ML Engineer, Driver Understanding and Evaluation. At Waymo, “the Waymo Driver” is the name of the software. The three U.S. versions of those jobs pay $213,000 to $356,000. You can see why an aggregator keyword page gets confused.

We also searched the 339 titles for “operator,” “attendant,” “depot” and “clean.” We found one compliance lead, one engineer automating depots, and nothing else. There were two technician jobs on the whole board, and one of them is in Munich.

Is Waymo hiring drivers? Here is who is

People do work next to these cars all day. They charge them, clean them, move them between depots, and respond when one stops somewhere awkward. Waymo mostly does not employ those people directly. It hires fleet operators, and those companies post the jobs.

Waymo and its fleet partners Transdev, Moove and Avis by city — The fleet partners named in Waymo’s public announcements and partner pages, with the cities each one covers. Sources are linked below.

Transdev is the big one. Its own page says it has been “testing, deploying, and operating Waymo’s robotaxi fleets” since 2019. That covers Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, with “over 1,000 operators.” Its autonomous careers site sets out a ladder. It starts at L1 Associate (depot work, charging, fueling, cleaning, inventory), goes up to L2 Operator (on-road support, roadside assistance, troubleshooting) and on to test specialists and site leads. Transdev’s job list loads by script, so we could not count its openings. That also means we have not checked its pay ourselves, and we are not quoting any.

Moove took over fleet management, charging and depots in Phoenix and Miami, TechCrunch reported in December 2024. Avis handles “general depot operations, including charging and maintaining the vehicles” in Dallas, per TechCrunch in July 2025.

Waymo vehicles parked at the Bayshore depot — Waymo vehicles lined up at the Bayshore depot in San Francisco. Depots like this are where most hands-on robotaxi jobs are, and a partner usually runs them. Photo: Dllu, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Something we only saw by reading the board: one of the Waymo postings is a Training Delivery Manager (Fleet Maintenance & Validation), marked “TTT.” That stands for train-the-trainer. Waymo hires the person who trains the trainers. The people those trainers teach are, by the look of it, on a partner’s payroll. That is the whole arrangement in one job title.

Waymo jobs with no degree: the short list

The Lead Development Technician job in Mountain View is the clearest one. It pays $51.45 to $62.99 an hour. It asks for “5+ years experience in an advanced automotive technician or automotive engineering role” and never mentions a degree. It is not an entry-level job. It is a real route for an experienced mechanic, though. Our scanner reads annual salary ranges and missed this hourly one. That is our gap, and we found it by opening the posting.

Past that, the no-degree route into robotaxis is the partner ladder above. If you are weighing it against other hands-on AI work, compare it with robotics technician jobs, data center technician jobs and the xAI Memphis facility roles. Those three are where the technician postings in our scan actually sit.

Waymo autonomous vehicle on University Drive in Tempe, Arizona — A Waymo on University Drive in Tempe. Phoenix is Waymo’s oldest market. Only 10 of the 339 postings list the Phoenix area, and fleet work there goes through partners. Photo: w_lemay, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Where the jobs are, and what they pay

254 of the 339 postings list Mountain View and 143 list San Francisco. Many list both. After that it drops off fast: New York 23, the Phoenix area 10, Kirkland or Seattle 10, Los Angeles 6, and the Detroit area 6. Twelve are marked remote. Outside the U.S. there are London 17, Warsaw 10, Tokyo 8 and Munich 4. So the searches for “Waymo jobs Los Angeles” and “Waymo jobs Phoenix” have a thin answer on Waymo’s side and a fuller one on the partners’ side.

Pay is published on 268 of the 339 postings, and the median range is $213,000 to $263,000. The lowest published U.S. range was $120,000 to $151,000, for a remote Software Quality Operations Specialist. For how that compares with the other nineteen employers, see which AI company pays the most. For why 71 postings show no range at all, see why job postings hide salary.

The internship wave. Waymo has 28 Summer 2027 internship postings, and 17 of them went up this week. That is almost half of Waymo’s 37 new postings. The bachelor’s-level software internship we opened lists $60 an hour. If you are a student, this is the week to watch. The timing pattern across all twenty employers is in when Summer 2027 internships open.

The week across all 19 boards

This week we count 3,844 open AI, robotics and autonomy roles across 19 employer boards, up 49 from last Monday. The net number undersells how much moved. 257 postings appeared and 208 came down, so about one listing in eighteen changed in seven days.

Bar chart of week-over-week change in open AI roles by company — Change in open roles per employer, September 14 to September 21, 2026.

Company	Sept. 14	Sept. 21	Change
Anthropic	596	615	+19
OpenAI	797	815	+18
xAI	255	266	+11
Waymo	330	339	+9
Mercor	103	109	+6
Cognition	94	98	+4
Perplexity	115	118	+3
Agility Robotics	66	69	+3
Figure AI	102	104	+2
Nuro	106	107	+1
1X	87	88	+1
Scale AI	223	223	0
Sierra	210	210	0
Replit	76	76	0
Physical Intelligence	35	35	0
Apptronik	83	82	-1
Cohere	144	142	-2
Cursor	127	122	-5
ElevenLabs	246	226	-20

Open roles on each employer’s public job board, read by our scanner on both Monday mornings. Google DeepMind is the twentieth board we track; its public address returned a 404 on both dates, so it is not in the table.

Three movements are worth a sentence each. Anthropic (+19) and OpenAI (+18) both added again this week. Our running reads are in is Anthropic hiring and is OpenAI still hiring. xAI (+11) keeps posting building-trades roles for its Memphis site: HVAC, fiber and plumbing technicians, most with no salary shown. ElevenLabs (−20) had the biggest drop. Its board lists 184 remote roles and publishes no pay ranges, so treat it as a big board getting smaller, not as layoffs. A posting coming down tells you nothing about why.

CNBC’s tour of the Ojai, Waymo’s newer vehicle (538,127 views, published May 28, 2026, checked September 21, 2026). Useful if you want to see what the people at the depots are looking after.

We are not recruiters. We take no money from Waymo, its partners, or any employer named here, and we do not handle applications. Postings can close without notice, and the official page wins. A real employer will not charge you a fee, ask you to deposit a check and send money back, or offer you a job by text. The FTC counted more than 105,000 job-scam reports in 2024 (FTC, Dec. 2024). A “Waymo driver” offer that arrives out of nowhere fits that pattern exactly. More in which AI work is real.

What to do with this

Want to work on the cars? Go to Transdev’s autonomous careers site and search your city. In Phoenix or Miami, look for Moove. In Dallas, look for Avis.
Want Waymo itself? Save a view of the Waymo roles on our board. It refreshes every morning from Waymo’s own feed and every row applies on Waymo’s site. You can also browse every open role and apply on the employer’s site. Waymo’s board has no job alert, as we found in our alert check.
Student? Apply to the Summer 2027 internships now. 17 went up in one week.
Seeing an old listing? Waymo re-dates its postings often. Read should I apply to old job postings before you skip one.

If you want to go deeper

Which AI companies are hiring the most right now? The full ranking, updated daily, is on which AI companies are hiring right now.

What if I have no experience at all? We keep a running list in entry-level AI jobs with no experience. If you are changing careers later in life, AI jobs for people over 50 is written for you.

Where do these numbers come from? They come from our own read of the public feeds behind twenty employer boards, once each morning. The method is in how we count. You can also ask the Jobs Desk a question. We answer in public and never charge.

Waymo Jaguar I-Pace in Century City, Los Angeles — A Waymo in Century City, Los Angeles. LA shows up on 6 of Waymo’s 339 postings. Transdev runs the LA fleet. Photo: Alexis Doine, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

Common questions about Waymo jobs

Is Waymo hiring right now?

Yes. On September 21, 2026 Waymo’s own job board listed 339 open roles, up from 330 a week earlier. 37 postings were new that week and 28 came down. 292 of the 339 are in the United States.

Is Waymo hiring drivers?

Not on its own board. Of the 339 roles, five have “driver” in the title and all five are engineering jobs working on the software that drives the car. Hands-on vehicle work — depot, charging, cleaning, roadside response — is run by fleet partners: Transdev in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Moove in Phoenix and Miami, and Avis in Dallas. Apply on the partner’s own careers site.

Does Waymo hire people without a degree?

A few. The clearest case on September 21, 2026 was a Lead Development Technician in Mountain View paying $51.45 to $62.99 an hour; the posting asks for five or more years as an advanced automotive technician and does not mention a degree. Most of the board is engineering and research. The entry-level route into the cars themselves runs through the fleet partners.

What are the Waymo “$14–$18 an hour driver” jobs I see in search results?

Those are keyword pages on job aggregators that collect listings mentioning the word Waymo. None of those roles are on Waymo’s own board. If a listing is real, it will lead to Waymo’s site or a named partner’s site — apply there, never through a messaging app.

Where are Waymo’s jobs located?

Mostly the Bay Area: 254 of the 339 postings list Mountain View and 143 list San Francisco (many list both). New York appears on 23, the Phoenix area on 10, Kirkland or Seattle on 10, and Los Angeles on 6. Twelve are marked remote.

How much does Waymo pay?

268 of the 339 postings publish a salary range. The median range runs from $213,000 to $263,000. The lowest published U.S. range on September 21 was $120,000 to $151,000, for a remote Software Quality Operations Specialist.

Does Waymo have internships?

Yes — 28 Summer 2027 internship postings on September 21, 2026, 17 of them new that week. A bachelor’s-level software internship we opened listed $60 an hour.

Cite this

On September 21, 2026, Prof H Lab counted 339 open roles on Waymo’s public job board, none of them for driving, cleaning or charging vehicles. Across 19 AI, robotics and autonomy employer boards it counted 3,844 open roles, up 49 from September 14. Source: AI Jobs Tracker, Prof H Lab.

Next Monday we will count again. We will be watching two things: whether Waymo’s internship count keeps rising, and whether Google DeepMind’s board comes back.

Sources

All counts: our own scan of 20 employer job boards on September 14 and September 21, 2026 (Google DeepMind unavailable). Method: how we count. Waymo board: careers.withwaymo.com.
Transdev, “Autonomous Mobility” and Transdev Alternative Services careers. Read September 21, 2026.
TechCrunch, Dec. 5, 2024 (Moove) and TechCrunch, July 28, 2025 (Avis).
Waymo postings opened September 21, 2026: Lead Development Technician, 2027 Summer Intern, Software Engineering, Commercialization.
FTC press release on job-scam reports, Dec. 2024.

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