Product Counsel

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.

As part of Waymo's Legal team, you will work on the exciting legal issues surrounding our transformational autonomous driving technology and help drive our business lines forward from technology ideation through scaled commercial deployment. We partner with our public policy, safety, security and privacy experts to define transportation policy for the autonomous driving world to come, advising on regulatory changes that support and protect our users around the world. We collaborate with our engineering, product, strategy and operations teams to develop and protect our intellectual property portfolio and drive our corporate and commercial transactions. We ensure compliance with an increasingly complex and dynamic range of global regulations. And we anticipate, mitigate, and litigate high-profile and precedent-setting legal matters.

In this Hybrid role you will report to the Managing Counsel, Safety, Security & Operational Integrity.

You will:

• Provide proactive product counseling to safety, product, engineering, operations, and security teams.

• Deeply understand Waymo’s product, operations, and roadmaps, and provide business-focused advice to enable Waymo’s domestic and international growth.

• Advise on product and operational legal risk, including safety and security matters, across multiple jurisdictions and liability regimes (domestic and international).

• Advise on interactions with partners, vendors, and suppliers on matters posing legal risk, including investigations.

• Advise on approaches to inbound inquiries, internal and external communications, and proposed safety-related research publications.

• Participate as a member of the legal incident response team.

You have:

• Law degree (LLB, LLM, or JD), plus at least 5 years of prior litigation and/or product counseling experience with a law firm or in-house legal department.

• Excellent communication skills and ability to explain complex legal concepts succinctly and pragmatically.

• Strong interpersonal skills and ability to partner effectively at all levels of the company and cross-functionally, including with executives and technical staff.

• Deep understanding of the product life-cycle, vehicle/fleet operations, and litigation/judicial process.

• Strong organizational skills and attention to detail; ability to manage a significant workload with competing deadlines in a fast-paced environment.

• Proficiency and comfort navigating ambiguity and developing effective, business-oriented solutions to managing legal risk; enthusiasm for winning together as a team and working collaboratively with legal and non-legal stakeholders.

We prefer:

• Experience working with automotive or emerging technology companies, or with complex hardware, software, and interrelated technologies.

• Product counseling experience, including for products or operations spanning multiple domestic or international jurisdictions and product liability regimes.

• Cybersecurity, data security, and/or security counseling experience.

• Operations and fleet experience.

• Experience counseling across a range of subject matters relevant to regulated industries, emerging technologies, or AI.

• Experience providing legal advice on crisis management or internal investigations.

• Experience defending multi-party tort litigation, investigations, or trials.

• Experience responding to governmental requests for information, and/or other torts, commercial, employment, or IP litigation experience.

Travel Requirements:

• Travel to San Francisco Bay Area (Mountain View) several times throughout the year for major team meetings and company events.

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
$238,000—$302,000 USD