Senior Product Manager, Autonomous Vehicle Reliability

Waymo; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 241,000 - 297,000; Full time

Job summary

Waymo is seeking a senior Product Manager to drive reliability for the Waymo Driver, shaping how we measure failures, guide hardware and software changes, and ensure a safe, high-quality autonomous driving system.

You will partner with teams across hardware, software, data science, and operations, reporting to a Director of Product. This role focuses on long-term product strategy, platform evolution, and scaling the fleet across new geographies and conditions.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering or a technical field.
• 10+ years of experience in AV, robotics, or ML/AI product roles.
• Experience with data analysis and statistics in AI/ML contexts.
• Experience bridging hardware and software domains.
• Deep understanding of driving and road rules.

Responsibilities

• Set the roadmap for evaluating the reliability of the Waymo Driver and measure how hardware or software failures occur.
• Own onboard solutions, hardware changes, and testing strategies to minimize reliability issues in the field.
• Develop strategies for new hardware platforms, geographies, and ODDs to ensure a reliable vehicle as the fleet grows.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to align on long-term product vision and actionable plans.

Skills

ML/AI experience

Hardware-software intersection

Analytical problem-solving

Education

Bachelor’s degree in engineering or technical field

Master's degree (preferred)

Job description

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.

Waymo’s Product Management Team is a mission-driven team responsible for writing and enacting first-of-their-kind playbooks to bring fully autonomous driving technology to market. Our team develops simple solutions for complex problems by orchestrating cross-functional efforts to safely drive Waymo’s technology and the products it enables forward. We do this by understanding the customer, the business, and the technology. We are humble about the scope of our work, collaborative in our approach to problem-solving, and ambitious about our vision for the future.

This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to a Director of Product.

You Will

• As Waymo expands to more freeways, on more platforms, in more regions, in more weather, understanding vehicle reliability becomes critical to ensuring we have a high quality and safe product.
• You will set the roadmap for how we evaluate the reliability of the Waymo driver: measure how, when and where the hardware or software fails and what happens as a result.
• Be responsible for the onboard solutions,hardware changes, and testing strategies to minimize reliability failures, and mitigate issues in the field.
• Look to the future at new hardware platforms, new geographic launches and new ODDs, and build the systems and tools to ensure we have a reliable vehicle as we grow.

You Have

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical or engineering field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years experience working on AV, Robotics, or products that utilize Machine Learning or AI.
• Experience in analytical roles or AI / ML roles, interacting with data scientists, and a solid statistics foundation,
• Experience working at the intersection of hardware and software.
• A deep understanding of driving, vehicles and rules of the road.
• Ability to think about long-term product vision, and then decompose that into concrete, actionable plans with cross-org alignment.

We Prefer

• Experience with Evaluation of AVs, Large Foundational Model training / evaluation pipelines or the evaluation / experimentation platforms for large production systems (Ads, Search, Ranking, etc..).
• Experience working on system reliability of large fleets, servers, hardware deployments, data centers.
• An understanding of the hardware pieces that go into an autonomous vehicle stack, decomposition of system reliability and experience evaluating system performance,
• Master's degree in a technical or engineering field, or equivalent practical experience.

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.

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

• $241,000—$297,000 USD