---
title: 'Head of Learning & Development and Culture at Waymo'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-learning-development-and-culture-waymo-mountain-view-6y0rt4az1qp8'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-04'
---

# Head of Learning & Development and Culture at Waymo

- **Company:** Waymo
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Compensation:** $334k–$411k
- **Posted:** 2026-10-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-04
- **Apply:** https://careers.withwaymo.com/jobs?gh_jid=8281938

## 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.

Waymo is seeking a Head of Learning & 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 Learning & 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
- 15+ 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

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 $334,000—$411,000 USD

## About Waymo

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company that develops and operates the Waymo Driver, a self-driving system used for ride-hailing and trucking, with a mission to be the world’s most trusted driver.
- **Entity Type**: Private (subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google)
- **Headquarters**: Mountain View, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2009 (as the Google self-driving car project); became an independent company under Alphabet in 2016
- **Founders**: The project was initiated by Sebastian Thrun (Google X), with key early contributions from Anthony Levandowski and others. Current leadership is Co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, and Chief Safety Officer Mauricio Peña.

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Autonomous vehicles, self-driving technology, ride-hailing, autonomous trucking, mobility-as-a-service
- **Target customers**: B2C (riders via Waymo One), B2B (fleet operators, logistics companies, and partners), and enterprise (autonomous trucking and delivery)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “To be the world’s most trusted driver.” Waymo aims to save lives, drive inclusive mobility, and improve the state of the planet by making transportation safer, more accessible, and sustainable.

## Products & Services
- **Waymo One**: The world’s first commercial autonomous ride-hailing service. Offers fully driverless rides to the public in Metro Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The fleet is now all-electric (Jaguar I-PACE).
- **Waymo Via**: Autonomous trucking and logistics service for freight movement, operating with partners to move goods on highways.
- **Waymo Driver**: The company’s core autonomous driving system (software + hardware stack). It is designed to be integrated into various vehicle platforms for ride-hailing, trucking, and delivery.
- **Waymo Open Dataset**: A publicly available dataset of autonomous driving sensor data, provided to researchers to accelerate breakthroughs in the field.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (as a private subsidiary of Alphabet). Alphabet’s market cap is ~$2 trillion (as of mid-2025). Waymo is considered Alphabet’s most valuable “Other Bet.”
- **Key Metric**: Over 20 million rider-only (fully autonomous) rides served as of early 2025. 94% fewer serious injury crashes compared to human drivers over the same distance in operating cities.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Alphabet Inc. (parent company). Partners include Jaguar Land Rover (vehicle supply), Daimler Trucks (trucking), and various fleet operators and delivery services.
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid geographic expansion (largest fully autonomous service area in the world at 180 sq miles in Phoenix); transition to an all-electric fleet; expansion into Los Angeles and San Francisco; growing public trust (93% rider satisfaction rate); continuous hiring across engineering, operations, and AI.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & scale**: Waymo is the only company operating a fully autonomous, commercial, paid ride-hailing service across multiple major US cities, with millions of real-world miles driven without a human safety driver.
- **Deep Alphabet backing**: Access to vast resources, AI talent (DeepMind/Google Brain), and infrastructure (Google Maps, Cloud, AI chips).
- **Safety track record**: Publicly released data showing a 82-94% reduction in injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers, building regulatory and public trust.
- **Full-stack approach**: In-house development of hardware (LIDAR, cameras, radar), software (perception, planning, simulation), and operations (fleet management, rider experience).

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling safely**: Expanding service areas (adding more cities and suburbs) while maintaining a strong safety record.
- **All-electric fleet**: Transitioning the entire Waymo One fleet to zero-emission vehicles (Jaguar I-PACE) to align with sustainability goals.
- **Trucking & logistics**: Growing Waymo Via to capture the massive autonomous trucking market, partnering with OEMs and shippers.
- **AI & simulation**: Using advanced AI (including large models and generative AI) to improve the Waymo Driver’s decision-making and simulation-based validation.
- **Accessibility & inclusive mobility**: Designing for riders with disabilities, older adults, and underserved communities to ensure transportation is available to all.

## Why Work Here
- **Impact**: Work on technology that directly saves lives (1.4M traffic deaths globally each year) and reshapes the future of transportation.
- **Culture**: Waymo describes itself as a place for “ambitious thinkers and relentless problem solvers” with a deep respect for getting every detail right. Values include safety, innovation, and responsibility.
- **Teams**: Opportunities across Software Engineering, Hardware Engineering, AI Foundations, Product & Design, Operations & Supply Chain, Safety, Policy, and General & Administrative roles.
- **Internships**: Strong early-career program with internships for Bachelors, Masters, MBA, and PhD candidates, often leading to full-time offers.
- **Hiring process**: Transparent and structured. Includes an initial recruiter screen, 1-2 phone/video interviews, and a virtual onsite (up to 5 interviews). Emphasizes problem-solving, collaboration, and real-time thinking. AI tools are not permitted during technical assessments to ensure fair evaluation.
- **Remote/hybrid policy**: The careers page lists both on-site and remote roles, with most engineering and operations roles based in Mountain View, San Francisco, or other US locations.
- **Benefits**: Top-notch benefits, unique learning opportunities, thoughtful community engagement, and meaningful gatherings. Specific perks are not detailed publicly but are described as comprehensive.

## Sources
1. [Waymo.com](https://waymo.com/) – Official company website (mission, history, safety data)
2. [Waymo About Page](https://waymo.com/about/) – Company history, leadership, and milestones
3. [Waymo Careers Page](https://careers.withwaymo.com/) – Culture, teams, hiring process, benefits
4. [Waymo Open Roles](https://careers.withwaymo.com/jobs/search) – Current job listings and departments
5. [Waymo How We Hire](https://careers.withwaymo.com/how-we-hire) – Interview process, tips, and accessibility

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