📈 #88 The market speaks: Product OR Engineers are real

Waymo's $250k job posting proves that optimization is moving from back-office to product-embedded roles

The market is validating what I predicted back in April.

I argued that the most successful OR professionals would be those who combine:

• deep optimization knowledge,

• with a product mindset,

• cross-functional collaboration skills,

• and a relentless focus on business impact rather than mathematical elegance.

It was an emerging role called Product Operations Research Engineer.

It could’ve been thought as wishful thinking, but I was spotting some initial patterns while reviewing job postings.

Then Waymo -the Google-born autonomous driving company- published a job posting that reads like it was lifted directly from my post. They called the role differently, but the DNA is unmistakable.

And this isn’t coincidence. It’s proof that the market is converging toward a role I said was coming.

Today in Feasible we’ll cover:

• 🎯 What Waymo got right

• 🎫 What they’re still missing

• 🤔 Why this matters for your career

Ready? Let’s dive in… 🪂

🎯 What Waymo got right

As Operations Research Engineers, we’ve been trained to master algorithms and mathematical models.

That feels like the right place to go. Our area of expertise. Our comfort zone.

But you know that after starting working for the industry, that doesn’t matter that much.

Yes, you need that expertise, and they hire you because of that, but overtime you realize that you need other things like:

• Owning problems, not just the model.

• Working cross-functionalily with product and ops teams, not in isolation.

• Thinking about adoption, usability, and KPIs, ****not just about optimality gaps.

• Building with users and even becoming one of them to understand their real pains.

There are quite a few reasons why is that the case, and you can read them in the post I wrote back in April this year:

📈 #70 Are Product OR Engineers the future of Operations Research?

And this transformation, the change in the perspective, is happening in real life. Waymo posted this summer an interesting job that aligns perfectly well with what I outlined.

The job description explicitly calls for someone who will "build models, measurement and decision making frameworks to make the best data-driven decisions" while collaborating "cross-functionally with Engineering, Product and Operations teams."

That’s powerful.

They want someone who can "think big picture, understand the broader business and product context and integrate it with model outputs to make clear recommendations." Sound familiar? That's exactly the business impact mindset and product context integration I emphasized as core to the Product OR Engineer role.

And the salary range of $196,000-$248,000 tells another story:

Companies are valuing hybrid OR-product skill sets at senior engineering levels.

There’s a strong match on several parts: business impact mindset, problem ownership, and cross-functional ownership.

But there are a few gaps.

🎫 What they’re still missing

Waymo’s role represents about 70-80% of the full Product OR Engineer vision.

I see two specific areas of improvement here. Two areas that, if you master them, you’d be ahead of competition. Not only for this role, but for any OR-related role, because you cannot own the entire end-to-end pipeline of an optimization project without them.

1️⃣ The first one: they mention Python/SQL.

That’s pretty standard as you’ll need to retrieve information from a database and code something to solve optimization problems.

But there’s no explicit mandate for code quality, testing, or deployment pipelines.

And that’s a problem. A big one.

Applying TDD-like way of working for automated validation, techniques for making your code reusable and scalable, and CI/CD pipelines for model deployment will not make you just a better engineer, but a trustable one.

Those skills are needed for building trust, and it’s twofold: first, for you to trust you won’t break anything in future developments; second, for stakeholders to trust your solutions work.

You can read more here:

📈 #75 Breaking to build better: Implementing Test-Driven Development for Operations Research

But that’s just half the story. The *real gap -*and the one that will define the best careers in the next decade- is missing entirely…