Senior/Staff Technical Program Manager - Core Autonomy Capabilities
Zoox · Foster City, United States · 6mo ago
The Program Management Office (PMO) at Zoox is responsible for driving cross-functional program planning and execution at the highest level. We partner with leaders from across the company in vehicle development, system design, software engineering, manufacturing, fleet operations, and business functions to develop and deliver major corporate milestones on the path to launch, and beyond. Our program managers contribute to the end-to-end success of technical, integrated product milestones involving both of our vehicle platforms - the Toyota Highlander test fleet and Zoox's purpose-built robotaxi.
As a Technical Program Manager (TPM) for Core Autonomy Capabilities in PMO, you will own the portfolio of programs launching fundamental new autonomy and safety capabilities: fail-operational architectures, the next generation of the perception and motion planning stack, learned scene understanding and behavior models, collision avoidance, and the guidance and routing capabilities that expand where the vehicle can drive. These are new capabilities rather than refinements of shipped ones, and they sit on the critical path to launch.
This is a high-leverage, high-visibility portfolio role. Rather than a single subsystem, you will own several capability programs running concurrently, partnering with the TPMs who drive them and driving programs directly where no dedicated owner exists. The engineering, validation, and safety teams behind this work sit across several organizations outside your reporting line, so building credibility quickly and driving decisions without formal authority is core to the job.
In this role, you will:
- Own the outcome for each capability. Drive programs from architecture through the release that ships them, and define what "done" means when completion criteria are still being established.
- Partner with the TPMs who own individual capabilities. Set a consistent bar for how their programs are planned and reported, and unblock what they cannot resolve at their level.
- Make dependencies visible before they compress the schedule. These programs discover unknowns mid-flight; surface them early so leadership makes trade-offs explicitly rather than absorbing them invisibly in execution.
- Be the primary point of contact for milestone and executive leadership, synthesizing status across programs into one view and running reviews that produce decisions rather than status.
- Arbitrate scope during planning cycles. Prioritize and staff the portfolio with engineering and product leaders, expose what is unfunded, and bring priced options instead of open questions.
- Execute without a playbook. Launching capabilities that have never shipped before is uncharted territory — engage deeply in technical trade-offs, and bring creative alternatives when the ideal solution isn't available.
Qualifications
- BS or MS degree in an engineering discipline or equivalent experience.
- 8+ years of experience in engineering, program management, or management consulting with a focus on product development and success in leading complex cross-functional technical programs from start to finish.
- Experience in autonomy, robotics, or another complex safety-critical domain, with the technical depth to follow architectural trade-offs and validation results.
- Proven ability to influence without authority across organizational boundaries.
- Comfortable leading through ambiguity and enabling teams to perform in this environment.
- Excellent written, presentation, and verbal communication skills.
- Proficient in using program management tools such as Jira.
Bonus Qualifications
- Experience taking a novel capability from research or prototype into production.
- Experience shipping machine-learned components into a production, safety-critical system.
- Experience with verification and validation, release qualification, or safety case development.
- Experience with developing from scratch and scaling engineering or operational processes.