Program Manager - Vehicle Recovery Standards, Processes, & Quality

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 Vehicle Recovery, Safety & Logistics Lead is a critical operational leadership role responsible for ensuring the safe, efficient, and disciplined management of vehicle recovery operations, market safety oversight, and operational logistics within a Waymo market. As Waymo scales both Waymo Owned & Operated (O&O) and Partner markets, this role ensures that recovery procedures, safety standards, and vehicle logistics are consistently executed to maintain fleet availability, protect operational integrity, and reinforce Waymo’s commitment to safety. Operating within Market Operations, this leader serves as the market’s safety champion, ensuring that vehicle recovery activities, incident response coordination, and operational logistics are managed with discipline and aligned with Waymo’s Safety Management System (SMS) and regulatory expectations. The role also plays a key coordination function across partners, vendors, depot teams, and centralized operations to ensure incidents are resolved quickly, vehicle movement is optimized, and operational disruptions are minimized. This role requires strong operational judgment, safety leadership, and real-time coordination capability, enabling the market to maintain high service reliability while managing the complexities of autonomous fleet operations. You will: Global-to-Local Orchestration: Build with central teams and track operational metrics for safe vehicle recovery operations. Lead daily stand-ups between engineering and local ops to sync international infrastructure with vehicle deployment schedules. Operational Readiness: Direct the integration of depot logistics and "Day 1" playbooks to ensure all cross-functional teams are prepared for commercial launch. Rapid Bottleneck Resolution: Act as the primary escalation point for internal teams and regulatory agencies to bypass hurdles and keep launch timelines 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 Feedback Loop: Translate regional infrastructure data and community dynamics into actionable feature requests for the central product roadmap. 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 professional experience within safety critical transportation workflows, autonomous driving, aviation, or high-stakes logistics sectors. Safety Expertise: Proven mastery of Safety Management Systems (SMS) with a track record of maintaining rigorous regulatory and operational standards. Incident Management: Demonstrated ability to manage real-time incident response and complex vehicle movements in diverse, high-pressure environments. Vendor Quality Oversight: Concrete experience in vendor management, specifically overseeing multi third-party vendor ecosystems in transportation while maintaining strict cost efficiency. Data Proficiency: Strong analytical skills with the ability to monitor recovery trends and utilize data to measurably improve fleet availability. Cross-Functional Communication: Expert-level communication skills capable of seamlessly coordinating technical requirements between centralized operations and local field teams. We prefer: Performance Dashboards & KPIs: Proficiency in data visualization tools (e.g., Tableau, Looker) to design and monitor automated partner performance dashboards, tracking critical metrics such as response times, cost-per-recovery, and SLA compliance to drive data-backed accountability. Advanced degree: A Master’s degree in Business Administration, Systems Engineering, Robotics, or Supply Chain Management 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. Project Management Certification: Possession of a PMP or Six Sigma Black Belt to 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 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