Site Reliability Engineering, Technical Lead Manager

Waymo; Mountain View (CA); Hybrid; USD 298,000 - 368,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

Equity incentives

Excellent benefits

Job summary

Waymo in Mountain View, CA is seeking a Pipeline SRE Lead to drive reliability of release pipelines across our autonomous driving platform. The role requires deep SRE expertise, strategic planning, and hands-on leadership across diverse teams in a fast-moving environment.

You will lead an on-call oriented team, improve playbooks and incident response, partnering with Onboard, Eval and Simulator to scale our software delivery and robustness.

Qualifications

• Master's degree or PhD required in a technical field (CS/Engineering).
• 10+ years leading large-scale production software systems.
• 5+ years in organizational leadership.
• Experience organizing and running on-call rotations.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead an SRE team spanning Waymo's Release and Pipeline infrastructure.
• Organize and participate in on-call rotations for incident response.
• Harden software, develop playbooks, improve on-call metrics and post-mitigation workstreams.
• Lead the engineering analysis and response to novel, rare or unexpected events in the development cycle.
• Partner with Onboard, Eval and Simulator to improve large-scale software engineering practices.
• Contribute to system software architecture to improve robustness and debuggability.
• If needed: hire and manage additional engineers to contribute to the above responsibilities.

Skills

Lead large-scale production software

Organizational leadership

On-call rotations management

Influence without authority

Education

Master's or PhD in Computer Science/Engineering

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. As the Pipeline SRE Lead, you will play a key role in driving the reliability of our most critical release pipelines. You’ll lead the strategy and execution for observability, incident management, capacity planning, and continuous improvement of our production systems. You will be accountable for the response to novel, rare, or unexpected events encountered during our software release process. This includes both spearheading timely investigations and resolutions, as well as proactively partnering with engineering to evolve our software system to enhance their robustness and adaptability. This unique role encompasses planet scale software delivery systems which underpin our rapidly growing and evolving fleet of autonomous vehicles operating in multiple cities. The challenges of ensuring reliability at our scale and pace is unprecedented. If you are a hands‑on SRE lead, with strong software engineering skills, who is passionate about solving first‑of‑their‑kind problems with significant real‑world impact, we'd like to meet you. This is a hybrid role and reports to the Head of Planner within the Onboard organization.

You Will

• Lead an SRE team spanning Waymo's Release and Pipeline infrastructure.
• Organize and participate in oncall rotations for how to respond to driving issues in the field.
• Harden software, develop playbooks, improve oncall metrics and post‑mitigation workstreams, and improve robustness of the software system running our most critical release processes.
• Lead the engineering analysis and response to novel, rare or unexpected events encountered during our development analysis cycle.
• Partner with organization leads and others across the Onboard, Eval and Simulator organization to improve large‑scale software engineering best practices.
• Contribute to system software architecture to help improve its robustness and debuggability.
• If needed: request, hire, and manage additional engineers to contribute to the above responsibilities.

You Have

• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of experience leading large‑scale production software systems, especially machine learned systems.
• 5+ years of experience as an organizational leader, managing a group of people and partnering with other organizational leaders.
• Experience organizing and running oncall rotations.
• Excellent influence without authority skills.
• Organizational awareness, extremely collaborative, strong communication, focus on value add to the company and to the team.

We Prefer

• Experience leading hybrid hardware/software production systems.
• Experience leading teams who work on modern deep ML / large scale models.
• Track record of bringing about change in 1000+ person engineering organizations.

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. Salary Range $298,000—$368,000 USD 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.