Head of People Development & Culture

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.

Waymo is seeking a Head of People Development and Culture to play a pivotal role in the growth and scale of the company. This organization's charter is to define and design our overall learning roadmap, core skills architecture and functional upskilling initiatives to support Waymo’s business objectives. This includes managing our overall learning technology ecosystem as well as vendor partners to support our curriculum.

The successful candidate will have the ability to toggle between both the strategic and operational nature of the role, with deep understanding of the business and its priority needs to drive a best-in-class learning and development function. This individual is expected to set the vision for the team while hiring and supporting individual team members in their development and career objectives.

The Head of People Development and Culture is a human-centered and empathetic leader who is curious and data-driven, dedicated to team collaboration and cultivating talent to thrive across Waymo.  

You will:

• Architect and deliver a multi-year learning and capability strategy that empowers our talent to achieve Waymo’s mission “to be the world’s most trusted driver.”


• Provide a framework for guiding the implementation of our learning strategy to support both the enterprise wide horizontal needs as well as functional and cohort demands. This includes key stakeholder involvement from the business to inform the capabilities needed, both human and agentic to identify and address our evolving needs as a company.


• Build an enduring, scalable leadership pipeline by equipping leaders with stage-specific capability building opportunities and curriculum from first-time manager fundamentals to manager-of-managers and executive leadership.


• Serve as a subject matter expert to cultivate a strong learning culture, driving awareness, education, and shared accountability for the employee experience across cross-functional teams.


• Further integrate Waymo Way values and behaviors directly into everyday operations to recognize, reinforce, and elevate valued capabilities. 


• Develop holistic success measures into our learning and culture practices and implement appropriate measurements to track our efforts and better influence decisions related to our curriculum.


• Champion and guide our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), setting strategic direction and providing programmatic support on all programs and efforts to maximize impact across Waymo.


• Be a trusted advisor to the business, and in partnership with our People Business Partner team, be responsive to the short-term and long-term needs to enable success against business objectives.


• Continuously improve our new hire orientation and onboarding in partnership with People Operations, expert instructors and our business leadership to deliver a magical employee experience grounded in our Waymo values and behaviors.


• Establish governance, mission, budget and oversight for all People Development and Culture work that impacts Waymo's workforce.

You have:

• BA/BS degree or equivalent practical experience in Human Resources, Learning & Development or related discipline


• 10+ years of progressively responsible management experience within the leadership and organizational development field overseeing enterprise learning, leadership development and talent systems in a complex organization 


• Experience working in a high-growth, tech environment 


• Advanced knowledge and applied background in training and organizational development.


• Strong organizational development background, with proven ability to drive enterprise wide change structural and behavioral change efforts


• Advanced business partnering skills to develop and maintain relationships with senior leadership, front-line managers and all levels of the organization in service of delivering against critical business needs 


• Track record of scaling and delivering programs and efforts that directly align and support the company’s strategic objectives and our talent strategy priorities, in close partnership with our People team and business stakeholders


• Highly data driven with demonstrated ability to translate analytics into insights and recommendations to drive decisions and measurable organizational impact


• Experiences in identifying critical human capabilities and pathways to ensure learning programs address the critical needs of an AI centered workforce of the future including judgement, discretion and accountability


• Demonstrated experience hiring and developing a high performing, collaborative team


• Passion for an inclusive work environment, seeking to understand diverse viewpoints in the decision-making process


• Track record of strong collaboration skills with the ability to work effectively in a high-paced, fast growing environment 


• Detail-oriented and committed to a high degree of accuracy

We prefer:

• Experience in client-facing roles to engage, listen, educate and respond with priority actions in partnership with key stakeholders across various functions and levels


• Experience in interpreting external and internal trends, innovation and thinking and translating them into effective practices


• Comfortable to fail and experiment, conduct retrospectives and harness learnings to shape actions