Michael Koval
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Waymo
San Leandro, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMichael Koval is a Senior Staff Software Engineer with 16 years of experience building motion planning and evaluation systems for autonomous vehicles, currently leading Planner and Evaluation teams at Waymo. He blends deep robotics research—PhD-level work from Carnegie Mellon—with hands-on production engineering, having also led engineering at Berkshire Grey and contributed to NASA projects. Michael is an active open-source contributor to foundational robotics toolkits like DART and OpenRAVE, improving low-level dynamics and multi-controller interfaces that power simulation and motion frameworks. Based in San Leandro, he pairs systems-level architecture with pragmatic bug fixes and feature work, demonstrating comfort across core C++ codebases and large-scale AV pipelines. Outside work he applies the same engineering curiosity to complex home automation projects, reflecting a penchant for integrating research-grade solutions into everyday systems.
16 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Robotics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Robotics at Carnegie Mellon UniversityBachelor's degree, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bachelor's degree, Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Rutgers University
Github Skills (14)
simulations10
simulation10
robotics10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
kinematics10
python10
openra10
dynamics10
apidoc9
api9
architecture8
architectures8
cmake6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
dartsim/dart
May 2015 - Apr 2016
DART: Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:131 commits, 36 PRs, 401 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the core functionality of the DART toolkit by addressing bugs and implementing new features related to the dynamics of joints within the system. Their work involved fixing range checks, adding virtual destructors to joint properties, and incorporating functions to retrieve joint types. These changes involved modifying numerous header and source files related to joint definitions and implementations, indicating a focus on improving the underlying mechanics of the robotics and simulation toolkit.
kinematicsroboticsanimationcomputer-animationsimulation
rdiankov/openrave
Jun 2013 - Jul 2014
Open Robotics Automation Virtual Environment: An environment for testing, developing, and deploying robotics motion planning algorithms.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 commits, 1 PR, 5 comments in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to extending the OpenRAVE library by adding and integrating a `MultiController` interface. This involved defining the interface in `openravepy_controller.cpp` and `openravepy_int.h`, registering it, and implementing the core functionality in `src/libopenrave-core/multicontroller.cpp`. Furthermore, the user added support for GT_None in several files and updated the qtcoinrave library.
deployingroboticsvirtual-environmentdevelopingtesting
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