Tech Lead Manager, Hill-Climbing & Launch Eval

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. Within Waymo's Perception Eval, the Hillclimbing & Launch Eval team is dedicated to enabling rapid, actionable, and smooth development cycles and releases for all of Perception. We design, build, and enhance critical evaluation workflows and are ultimately accountable for the quality and efficiency of the eval process. Our work empowers teams across Perception to effectively hillclimb model performance and software quality, ensuring successful and safe launches. This involves deep collaboration with ML, Simulation, Data Science, and Infrastructure partners. In this hybrid role, you will report to an Engineering Manager You will: People Management & Growth: Manage, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of software engineers (levels ranging from Junior to Staff), handling performance reviews, career planning, and hiring. Strategy & Roadmap: Define the technical strategy and 12+ month roadmap for evaluation frameworks that allow for rapid, safe and smooth hill-climbing & release for Waymo Perception models, accelerating multi-city expansion and keeping alignment with company-wide safety goals. Execution & Delivery: Oversee the end-to-end delivery of complex evaluation platforms and data pipelines, removing blockers and ensuring the team meets critical release deadlines and accelerates the evolution of Perception models.. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Serve as the primary point of contact for the team, collaborating deeply with ML researchers, simulation & ML infra teams, and safety experts to define & measure what "success" looks like for the Waymo Driver. Technical Guidance: Guide technical decision-making and architectural trade-offs (without necessarily writing the code), ensuring the team builds scalable, maintainable, and reliable systems. Organizational Health: Foster a culture of psychological safety, technical excellence, and inclusivity, while managing team capacity and resource planning. You have: Engineering Management Experience: 2+ years of experience directly managing software engineering teams, including performance management, hiring, and retention. Technical Background: Previous background as a software engineer or technical lead (5+ years) with a strong understanding of evaluation frameworks and methodologies, scalable data pipelines and performance benchmarks. Delivery Track Record: Proven ability to manage complex technical projects with ambiguous requirements and multiple stakeholders, delivering on time and at quality. Data-Driven Mindset: Experience using metrics and data to drive team improvements and measure project success. Strategic Thinking: Ability to translate high-level business goals (e.g., "Launch in Austin") into concrete technical roadmaps and team priorities. We prefer: Domain Expertise: Experience working in Autonomous Vehicles, Robotics, or Safety-Critical systems. ML/Data Experience: Familiarity with the lifecycle of Machine Learning models, specifically regarding evaluation, validation, testing, or "ground truth" data generation. Scale: Experience managing teams that own large-scale data processing pipelines (Spark, Flume, Beam) or high-throughput systems. 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 $238,000 — $302,000 USD

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