Program Manager, New Markets & Platforms

The Software Quality Operations (SWQ Ops) 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.

This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to a SWQ Ops Triage Program Manager Team Lead. This role will lead a team of 5 and requires prior leadership experience.

Waymo is undergoing unprecedented growth, rapidly expanding into new cities and launching new vehicle platforms. SWQOps plays a critical role in this expansion, making it possible to scale safely and efficiently. We are on the front lines of: 

• De-risking New Deployments: Through meticulous triage of driving 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. 
• 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 triage, data analysis, and quality assurance to unblock critical milestones, preventing slowdowns in market expansion velocity. 
• 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. 
• 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 orgs. 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 in Technical Operations, Program Management, or Quality Engineering
• Proven ability to manage complex technical 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.
• People management experience

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