Program Manager, Software Quality Safety Operations

Waymo

Salary: $159k - $196k
Experience: 7+ yrs
Location: Mountain View or Remote
Job type: Full-time

Required skills

Agile
Scrum
Machine Learning
Data Analysis
Python (likely)
AI tools

About the role

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

The Software Quality Operations (SWQOps) team is at the heart of ensuring the safety, reliability, and quality of the Waymo Driver. Our mission is to build an adaptable and scalable operation, increasingly powered by AI, to deliver the crucial insights necessary to confidently deploy and grow Waymo's autonomous vehicle service.

Why This Team is Essential to Waymo's Success:

Waymo is undergoing unprecedented growth, rapidly expanding into new cities (targeting ~20 new cities by EOY 2026) and launching new vehicle platforms. SWQ Ops plays a critical role in this expansion, making it possible to scale safely and efficiently. The Scenario Operations team within SWQ Ops owns the scaled delivery and maintenance of simulation-based directed testing coverage used to evaluate the Safety and performance of the driver as Waymo continues to scale. We are on the front lines of:

De-risking New Deployments: Through meticulous triage of driving and simulated events, issue discovery, and continuous field monitoring, SWQOps provides early warnings and critical insights. This "early intervention in RO issue detection" ensures operational resilience and safety, particularly in new and complex environments, which is critical as Waymo enters multiple new cities and ramps up platforms like Ojai.
Driving Engineering Velocity: By handling the vital work of performance evaluation, issue deep-dives, and data set curation, SWQOps collaborates heavily and allows Waymo's Engineering, SysEng, Simulation, and Data Science teams to focus on their core tasks of developing and improving the Waymo Driver.
Enabling Market Expansion: Our team is deeply integrated into every stage of Waymo's market entry framework, from initial city evaluation (OK2Plan) to scaling operations (OK2Scale). We provide the necessary data analysis, policy development, and quality assurance to unblock critical milestones, preventing slowdowns in market expansion velocity.
Data Flywheel: Supporting the development of a single, automated, end-to-end machine learning flywheel for the entire Waymo Driver. A successful flywheel will be the core engine for scaling our technology, enabling faster ODD expansion, quicker remediation of driving issues, and a significant reduction in the engineering effort required to maintain and improve the driver.

You will:

Drive outcomes for programs that span multiple functions. Responsible for long term forecasting and resource planning.
Be responsible for standing up new workflows and scaling existing workflows to support new market expansions. Translate complex human operations into scaled and reliable operations, bringing key insights to customers at highest quality.
Communicate overall program status, risks and current priorities to stakeholders. Drive tradeoff decisions making across functions.
Define program / workflow KPIs and SLAs. Drive high-quality outcomes through deployments with a global vendor workforce.
Drive workflow transformation efforts to meet evolving business needs. Partner with Engineering to design, test, and deploy cutting-edge Machine Learning (ML) and Generative AI (Gen-AI) models and tools to drive step-change improvements in issue discovery & detection, triage efficiency, and quality assurance.

You have:

Bachelor's degree in technical or business discipline
7+ years of experience (5+ leading teams) managing complex, tech-enabled operations and experience working across technical partners (Product, Engineering, Data Science, Systems Engineering) to drive outcomes
Proven ability to manage complex technical operations programs, including structuring project plans, identifying dependencies, and driving execution using Agile methodologies (e.g., Scrum)
Increased competency in supporting all phases of the machine learning development lifecycle, from data preparation and training to validation, deployment, and continuous monitoring
Ability to thrive in a high ambiguity, dynamic environment

We prefer:

Undergraduate in technical degree preferred
MBA or graduate operations experience preferred
Experience within A / V space
Experience with Lean / Six Sigma process improvement methodologies
Experience working with offshore teams / multiple local operations hub

((Remote jobs only - Please note that Waymo may not be able to employ remotely in all locations. Please speak with your recruiter about your preferred location for remote work when you begin the interview process.))

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is listed below. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the role location or, if the role can be performed remote, the specific salary range for your preferred location, during the hiring process.

Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements.

Salary Range

$159,000—$196,000 USD

About Waymo

Autonomous driving technology for ride-hailing and logistics.

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