Head Risk Management Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

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.

In this hybrid role you will report into our Head of Enterprise Resilience.

You will:

• Lead and execute resilience risk assessments across critical business services, infrastructure, and operations; evaluate control effectiveness within a structured framework aligning with the broader Waymo Risk Management (WRM) strategy and Safety Management System (SMS).
• Develop, maintain, and own the Enterprise Resilience Risk Register with clear risk ownership; provide independent oversight of resilience risks and investigate deviations across Operations, Technology, and Safety to ensure robust compliance.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to proactively identify, monitor, and mitigate risks related to service disruptions (e.g., extreme weather, infrastructure failures, regulatory changes); provide informed, data-driven resilience opinions on major initiatives and market expansions.
• Lead the development of enterprise-wide resilience metrics, KPIs, and reporting dashboards to monitor SMS/policy performance; analyze trends and present findings to the organization and committees at all levels, surfacing key insights as a critical input for strategic prioritization and decision-making.
• Set the strategy, objectives, and escalation paths for your functional area, reporting regularly to the Executive Leadership Team (ELT), safety committees, and the risk board to ensure alignment with Waymo's approved risk appetite and manage the formal process around resilience risk acceptance.
• Monitor and rigorously evaluate the impact of newly proposed industry standards and regulatory requirements on Waymo's compliance programs, establishing strategic alliances to address cross-functional remediation plans.
  

You have:

• 8+ years of experience in a risk-related field, preferably with a focus on complex operations that include both software and real-world risk identification and control.
• Track record of strong cross-functional partnership with diverse stakeholders, especially to identify and map key dependencies, risks, and mitigations in complex operations.
• Extreme curiosity to understand the status quo, always asks "why?", and considers alternatives.
• Exceptional attention to detail with the ability to synthesize complex information into clear and concise documentation and presentations.
• Proven track record of communicating complex risk profiles and strategies to diverse groups of stakeholders, including executive-level audiences and steering committees as well as frontline operational teams.
• Familiarity with foundational business continuity concepts, specifically the relationship between Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and risk assessments, to ensure impact analysis effectively informs a comprehensive enterprise resilience risk snapshot.

We prefer:

• Background building resilience-related risk programs in an evolving regulatory landscape at a fast-paced, quickly scaling company.
• Deep understanding of excellence as it relates to regulatory requirements related to risk management and ensuring requirements are met in a way that is conducive to improving the company's understanding of compound risks, allowing for effective prioritization of mitigations and control.
• Experience evolving subjective, qualitative risk matrices into structured, data-driven frameworks utilizing capability maturity (e.g., CMMI) and quantitative risk (e.g., FAIR or Value-at-Risk) models.
• Experience in highly regulated industries such as Automotive, Maritime, Aviation, or similar sectors, providing familiarity with safety-critical systems, compliance frameworks, and complex operational procedures.
• Demonstrated experience leading rigorous auditing and conformance exercises toward both voluntary and regulatory compliance (e.g., ISO 31000, ISO 22301, or safety-critical frameworks)
• Demonstrated intellectual curiosity and a forward-thinking approach to leveraging data and AI tools (such as Gemini and Google Workspace) to optimize processes and solve complex problems, even if without direct technical development experience.

Travel: 

• As required, < 20%