Technical Lead Manager, Rider Growth

Job Summary

The Technical Lead Manager for Rider Growth at Waymo is responsible for building, leading, and inspiring a high-performing, cross-functional engineering squad focused on driving sustainable rider acquisition, activation, retention, and lifetime value.

Responsibilities

• Recruit, mentor, and grow a diverse, inclusive, and highly skilled engineering team.
• Foster a culture of high ownership, rapid iteration, and technical craftsmanship.
• Partner with Product Management, User Experience (UX) Design, and Data Science to define and execute a roadmap aimed at accelerating rider growth and retention.
• Lead the technical strategy for rider onboarding, focusing on shrinking the time-to-value from app download to the first driverless trip.
• Build smooth UX flows that solve high cognitive trust barriers, educate riders on vehicle safety, and optimize physical pickup/drop-off logistics.
• Architect and scale rider retention frameworks, including subscription services, commuter packages, and loyalty programs that incentivize frequent, habitual riding.
• Collaborate with ML scientists and economists to design and scale highly reliable, low-latency promotional engines.
• Build backend systems that distribute personalized, budget-capped promotions to shape rider demand and maximize incremental ridership.
• Champion a highly quantitative, data-driven engineering culture.
• Drive standard-setting experimentation practices, ensuring the team runs robust A/B tests, interprets statistical outcomes accurately, and rapidly integrates learnings back into the product.
• Oversee the scalability, latency, and reliability of your team's services.
• Ensure seamless, high-performance integrations with Waymo's core routing, fleet dispatch, pricing engines, and billing ledgers.

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience directly managing and scaling high-performing software engineering teams, with a strong track record of mentoring senior and staff-level engineers.
• 6+ years of hands-on software development experience building highly scalable, distributed backend systems (Go, Java, C++, or Python) and/or high-performance B2C mobile applications (iOS/Android).
• Deep, practical experience running systematic product experiments (A/B testing, multivariate testing) with a strong grasp of statistical significance, experimental design, and cohort analysis.
• Fluency in using data analytics tools (SQL, Python/Pandas, Tableau, etc.) to diagnose user drops, analyze funnel health, and identify new conversion opportunities.
• The ability to thrive in a fast-paced, evolving environment, managing multiple parallel product experiments while maintaining absolute engineering craftsmanship.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience scaling B2C products by driving measurable improvements across the Acquisition, Retention, and LTV lifecycle.
• Proven success architecting ML-driven systems for real-time offer surfacing and ranking, leveraging techniques like Multi-Armed Bandits to optimize incentives at scale.
• Outstanding communication and collaboration skills.
• The ability to translate high-level business and economic goals into rigorous technical requirements and align stakeholders across the business.

Benefits

Waymo offers a competitive salary range of $251,000—$310,000 USD, actual starting pay based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. 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.