Senior Safety Management System (SMS) Risk Integration Specialist

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.

This role follows a hybrid work schedule and reports to the Safety Management System Lead.

In the Senior Safety Management System (SMS) Risk Integration Specialist role, you will advance how Waymo manages and tracks safety risk across our technology, operations, and organization as part of the Safety Risk Management function of our SMS. Combining a technical risk management background with cross-functional leadership, you will partner with teams across Waymo to assess our risk management practices against safety regulations, solve workflow pain points, and define requirements for risk tools that track hazards and mitigations from identification through verified risk reduction.

You will:

• Create Enterprise Risk Integration Processes: Design, develop, and implement scalable, repeatable processes and frameworks that synthesize information into a unified view of Automated Driving System safety risk.

• Drive Enterprise Risk Tooling Solutions: Define business requirements, data taxonomies, and workflow specifications for enterprise safety risk tooling and partner with tooling teams to build, deploy, and iterate on these solutions.

• Enable Closed-Loop Mitigation & Impact Tracking: Establish end-to-end traceability mechanisms to track risk treatments and mitigations across distributed safety methodologies from initial identification through implementation and post-deployment verification of risk-reduction impact.

• Lead Regulatory Conformance & Gap Analysis: Evaluate the impact of domestic and international regulations and standards on Waymo’s Safety Risk Management practices, identifying compliance gaps and driving corrective roadmaps.
• Harmonize Cross-Functional Risk Workflows: Partner closely with teams to diagnose process inefficiencies, pain points, and blind spots, bringing stakeholders together to align on practical solutions.
• Deliver Executive Risk Visibility & Audit Readiness: Develop risk reporting dashboards, safety performance indicators, and executive summaries that equip safety governance committees and leadership with a holistic risk picture, while supporting preparation for external regulatory inspections and audits.

You have:

• A Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Systems Engineering, Physical Sciences, or a related scientific or analytic discipline.

• Minimum 5 years of experience in System Safety, Functional Safety, or Safety Risk Management within complex, safety-critical industries (such as autonomous vehicles, automotive, transportation, aerospace, aviation, robotics, defense, or medical devices).

• Strong working knowledge of traditional hazard analysis and risk assessment methodologies (e.g., FMEA/DFMEA, FTA, HAZOP, Event Tree Analysis, Bowtie analysis) and foundational safety standards (e.g., ISO 26262, ISO 21448 / SOTIF, MIL-STD-882, ARP4761, or ISO 31000).

• Demonstrated experience translating complex safety or risk management workflows into clear business requirements, data models, and functional specifications.

• Proven ability to conduct process and compliance gap analyses across distributed technical teams, synthesize disparate risk inputs into cohesive frameworks, and drive cross-functional alignment without direct authority.

• Strong analytical and communication skills, with experience distilling multifaceted technical, operational, and organizational risk data into clear insights for senior leadership and governance bodies.

We prefer:

• An advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in Engineering, Systems Safety, Computer Science, or a related scientific or analytic field.

• Hands-on familiarity with automotive, transportation, or aviation Safety Management System frameworks.

• Experience leveraging modern risk tooling and applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Large Language Model (LLM) workflows to automate, synthesize, or enhance hazard identification, risk aggregation, and traceability.

• Familiarity with the breadth of evaluation techniques used across autonomous vehicle safety frameworks (e.g., simulation-based collision avoidance testing, predicted collision rate modeling, field safety monitoring, and safety cases).

• Direct experience interpreting and implementing vehicle regulations.

• Experience coordinating and guiding teams through the build, rollout, and adoption of internal enterprise tools.

Travel

Travel is required for team onsites as well as for potential project-based activities or key regulatory meetings.