Global Scale Senior Program Manager

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 enabling safe and successful scale-up into new international markets and incubating mission-critical, high-impact workflows. 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, including international expansion to London and Tokyo 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:

• International RO & New Market Readiness: Concerted effort to update triage policy, standing Voice of Customer in new countries. Through meticulous triage of driving events, issue discovery, and continuous field monitoring, SWQOps provides early warnings and critical insights to Product and Data Science partners.
• 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 international expansion, quicker remediation of driving issues, and a significant reduction in the engineering effort required to maintain and improve the driver.
• 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.
• Workflow Incubation & Development: Incubating high-impact workflows and ensuring readiness for automation and long-term operational excellence.

In this role you will:

• Build strong, locally-rooted software quality operations, leveraging local driving knowledge and the voice of customer to drive the necessary updates in triage policy, issue discovery, and regulatory reporting.
• Lead the strategic planning and execution of the Global Scale & Workflow Incubation roadmap.
• Drive continuous improvement.
• Manage cross-functional partnerships (Eng, SysEng, DS, Policy) to unblock key market milestones for international expansion.
• Own communication and alignment with executive stakeholders on progress, risks, and resource needs for international scaling.
• Leverage AI-powered insights and traditional triage signals to proactively identify emerging on-road issue trends, new risk scenarios, and edge cases.
• Develop and refine data-driven strategies for issue discovery and monitoring, enhanced by ML model outputs.
• 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 disciplines.
• 10+ years of experience (5+ leading teams) managing complex, tech-enabled operations.
• Strong experience working cross functionally with technical partners (Product, Engineering, System Engineering, Data Science) to drive outcomes.
• Ability to translate complex human operations into scaled and reliable operations, bringing key insights to customers at highest quality.
• Increased competency in supporting all phases of the machine learning development lifecycle, from data preparation and training to validation, deployment, and continuous monitoring.
• Familiarity with autonomous vehicle technology.
• A proven ability to work in a fast-paced, high-stress environment while maintaining good judgment.

We prefer:

• Undergraduate in technical degree preferred.
• MBA or graduate operations experience preferred.
• Experience with Lean / Six Sigma process improvement methodologies.
• Ex-consulting experience a plus.
• Experience working with offshore teams / multiple local operations hubs.
• Experience within A / V space.
• Competency in LLM / transformer models, and / or ML for robotics domain.

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. Salary Range £110,000 — £119,000 GBP