Program Manager - Vehicle Recovery, Safety, & Logistics

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  The Vehicle Recovery, Safety & Logistics Lead is a critical leadership role responsible for driving scalable operations, risk management, and disciplined execution of safety workstreams within a fast-paced tech environment. As Waymo scales, this role ensures that safety standards, compliance frameworks, and operational programs are consistently managed to maintain fleet availability and protect operational integrity. Operating within Market Operations, this leader serves as the market’s safety champion, ensuring that incident response and cross-functional safety programs are managed with discipline. The role also plays a key coordination function across engineering, data science, product, and centralized operations to build scalable workflows, ensure incidents are resolved quickly, and minimize operational disruptions. This role requires strong program management skills, data-driven decision-making, and real-time coordination capability, enabling the market to maintain high service reliability."        

You will:

• End-to-End Program Ownership: Lead cross-functional initiatives from problem definition to execution, partnering with engineering and ops teams to track metrics and ensure safe operations.
• Scalable Workflow Design: Design and implement scalable workflows, processes, and operating models to support rapid market growth and evolving operational needs.
• Risk & Compliance Strategy: Translate complex regulatory and policy requirements into scalable operating models and enforcement frameworks to ensure launch timelines stay on track.
• Strategic Stakeholder Management: Build and maintain relationships with transit authorities and emergency services to ensure safe community integration and positive public perception.
• Product & Data Partnerships: Partner with Product, Data Science, and Engineering to translate operational data into actionable feature requests and inform strategic decisions.
• Risk & Compliance Oversight: Audit operational logs and identify market-specific threats to ensure 100% adherence to municipal permit requirements.

You have:

• Industry Tenure: A minimum of 7+ years of program management experience, preferably within a tech environment, trust and safety, or marketplace operations.
• Safety & Compliance Expertise: Proven mastery of safety and compliance frameworks with a track record of maintaining rigorous regulatory and operational standards in fast-paced environments.
• Incident Management: Demonstrated ability to manage real-time incident response and complex vehicle movements in diverse, high-pressure environments.
• Cross-Functional Program Leadership: Concrete experience in cross-functional program leadership, specifically overseeing complex safety and operational programs across multiple internal and external stakeholders.
• Data Proficiency: Strong analytical skills and proficiency in data analysis and reporting tools, including SQL and analytics platforms (e.g., Looker, Sigma, Hex).
• Cross-Functional Communication: Expert-level communication skills capable of seamlessly coordinating technical requirements between centralized operations and local field teams.

We prefer:

• Experimentation & Impact Analysis: Experience designing and evaluating data-driven interventions and enforcement strategies using structured analysis to validate hypotheses.
• Advanced degree: A Master’s degree in Business Administration, Systems Engineering, Data Science, or related quantitative fields provides a deeper theoretical framework for complex deployments.
• Regulatory Liaison Experience: Prior success in directly negotiating with state or municipal DOTs and navigating the nuances of autonomous vehicle permitting.
• Executive Presence: Strong executive presence and communication skills to effectively lead cross-functional teams, influence stakeholders, and bring a standardized, disciplined approach to rapid market scaling.
• Crisis Communication Training: Formal experience in public relations or emergency response communication, particularly in high-visibility technology sectors.

Travel:

• 20%

The expected base salary range for this full-time position 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.  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.