Field Safety – Operations Performance
Waymo · Mountain View, CA, USA; Los Angeles, CA, USA
Posted September 11, 2026
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.
The Waymo Safety team works to promote and help to continuously improve the safety of Waymo’s fully autonomous driving technology. Our experts develop safety goals and strategies, and conduct safety engineering analyses to ensure safety is being considered throughout the design and development of our vehicles. The team develops and promotes safety strategies and policies for autonomous vehicles for its work with regulatory authorities, lawmakers, law enforcement and public and non-profit organizations. Our Safety Team also helps advise on compliance with applicable environmental, health, and safety regulations.
We are seeking an experienced safety leader to own Operations Performance on Waymo’s Field Safety team. In this role, you will engage on high-consequence issues affecting Waymo’s frontline human-in-the-loop operations. Applying systems thinking, your human factors expertise, and Human & Organizational Performance (HOP) principles, you will collaborate to identify and drive safety enhancements across autonomous and manual driving operations, testing programs, and depot environments.
This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to the Senior Director, Safety.
You will:
- Advance operational learning by leading deep-dive investigations into complex field events involving human-system interactions, resulting in process and system enhancements.
- Define and govern Waymo’s enterprise-level safety requirements and standards for human drivers and vehicle operators, including those related to fatigue and distracted driver risk mitigations.
- Analyze operational field data to feed closed-loop safety learning.
- Be a champion for a just safety culture throughout the organization.
You have:
- M.S. in Human Factors, Industrial Engineering, Organizational Psychology, Cognitive Science, or a related degree
- 10+ years experience with safety involving human-system interaction and complex socio-technical systems (e.g. autonomous systems, transportation, aerospace, robotics, or defense)
- Demonstrated expertise applying human factors engineering and HOP principles to incident investigations and risk control design
- Self-motivated and eager for cross-functional collaboration
We prefer:
- Ph.D. in Human Factors, Organizational Psychology, Industrial Engineering, Cognitive Science, or a related degree
- Experience with Fatigue Risk Management and/or human performance in automated driving or teleoperations.
Travel:
- As required, up to 10%
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.
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