Manager, Technical Product Management – Autonomy Integration

Job description

Zoox has completed its transition from research and development to an operational business: we now run a public-facing, commercial robotaxi service, with paying riders on the road and new cities coming online. The autonomy software system — the "driver" — is broken down into a portfolio of driving behavior clusters, each owned by a Technical Product Manager who is the accountable owner of that cluster's readiness for live commercial service, not just for an internal milestone. You will lead a team of 4–5 Senior and Staff-level Technical Product Managers who each own one or more driving behavior clusters. You will hire, coach, and grow this team while owning the portfolio-level view of readiness, risk, and roadmap health across every cluster they manage. This is a high-visibility role that sits at the intersection of autonomy software engineering, product, metrics, safety, and user research, and is critical to scaling our commercial autonomous driving service into new cities and driving domains. ### In this role, you will: - Lead a Team: Hire, manage, mentor, and grow a team of 4–5 Technical Product Managers, fostering a culture of ownership, rigor, and continuous improvement. - Develop Strategy: Own the overall strategy and prioritization framework for how driving behavior clusters are defined, broken into sub-clusters, and sequenced against company milestones, and align your team's roadmaps to it. - Provide Technical & Product Guidance: Be the escalation point for cross-cluster trade-offs and technical ambiguity, coaching your direct reports through readiness-criteria definition, metrics design, and stakeholder conflicts they can't resolve alone. Hold the bar on safety-critical rigor, ensuring go/no-go release criteria for each cluster are well-reasoned and defensible before they ship to the live fleet. - Monitor Performance: Establish and monitor portfolio-level KPIs and readiness metrics across all clusters your team owns, and hold a high bar for how your team defines and tracks their own. - Close the Operational Feedback Loop: Ensure your team systematically incorporates rider feedback, field operations observations, and on-road incident learnings from the live service into cluster roadmaps and readiness bars. - Manage Resources: Manage cluster assignments and team capacity, rebalancing ownership as the driving behavior cluster map evolves and the business scales. - Executive Communication: Translate cross-cluster status, risk, and trade-offs into clear, data-driven updates for autonomy engineering leadership, safety, and company executives. - Cross-Functional Partnership: Be a key interface between your team and autonomy software engineering, metrics, safety, and user research leadership to drive two-way collaboration with minimum churn to engineering teams. ### Qualifications - 8+ years of technical product management experience, ideally in autonomy, robotics, computer vision, or other safety-critical/complex software domains, including 3+ years directly managing a team of 4 or more technical product managers. - Demonstrated track record of hiring, coaching, and performance management, including growing individual contributors into more senior roles. - Strategy and leadership skills; proven ability to collaborate with internal partners and users to solve complex cross-functional problems and use influence to generate great outcomes. - Established skills in distilling ambiguous problem spaces into compelling product visions and translating them into team-level frameworks. - Technical background (degree in a technical field or equivalent practical experience) with enough depth to engage in architecture and trade-off discussions across perception, planning/controls, or comparable technical domains. ### Bonus Qualifications - Experience developing robotics products or autonomous vehicle software. - Background in computer vision, perception, or ML-driven systems. - Experience building or scaling a product management function through a research-to-commercial-launch transition. - Experience in another regulated or safety-critical industry (e.g., aerospace, medical devices, industrial automation) outside of autonomous vehicles.