Senior Program Manager, Validation Operations
About The Position
Nuro is seeking a Senior Program Manager for its Software Operations team, specifically within Validation Operations. This role is crucial for ensuring the safety and quality of Nuro's autonomous driving software before it is deployed on the road. The Senior Program Manager will be responsible for owning and improving the systems that ensure validation operations are accurate, scalable, and prepared for Nuro's growth. This involves partnering with various engineering teams (Autonomy, Systems, Data Platform) to deliver high-quality data essential for validation and expansion efforts. The role acts as a liaison between Engineering, Operations, and offshore partners, maintaining quality standards, developing scalable workflows, and enhancing overall ecosystem performance. It's a high-ownership position for individuals who are comfortable with ambiguity and aim to make a significant, measurable impact by investigating failures, driving data-informed decisions, and leading quality improvements.
Requirements
- 5+ years of program management experience embedded with software validation and/or AI/ML operations.
- Quality-obsessed approach to program management, energized by finding what is broken.
- Deep familiarity with data pipelines and labeling ecosystems, including annotation workflows, quality sampling, taxonomy design, and inter-annotator agreement.
- A track record of identifying and closing data quality gaps, with measurable impact on accuracy or model performance.
- Experience managing large-scale offshore or globally distributed annotation teams.
- Proficiency querying data with SQL and BigQuery, and using KPIs to drive prioritization, capacity management, and continuous improvement.
- Ability to work both strategically and hands-on, from designing a quality framework to personally tracing a labeling fault through a database.
- High agency and a history of building processes where none exist.
- Clear written and verbal communication, with the ability to influence and make complex information accessible to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Bachelor's degree in a technical or business discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
Nice To Haves
- Background in autonomous vehicles, software validation, robotics or data engineering.
Responsibilities
- Lead the day-to-day operations to ensure validation data flows accurately and on schedule.
- Bring structure to ambiguity and transform quality gaps into lasting improvements.
- Support critical validation programs by partnering with Autonomy, Systems, and Data Platform Engineering to provide operational support and data.
- Define metrics, sampling approaches, workflows, and operating mechanisms to ensure consistent, scalable data quality.
- Audit live workflows, query databases, and trace accuracy or pipeline failures to their root cause, driving corrective actions.
- Own the offshore vendor relationship, including budget, capacity, performance, and quality outcomes.
- Lead the adoption of improved operational practices through documentation, stakeholder engagement, pilot programs, and change management.
- Lead a small in-house team, strengthen oversight, and create evolving processes.
- Translate complex operational and technical issues into clear recommendations for Engineering, Operations, and leadership.
- Improve the validation operations function to be more scalable and trusted.
Benefits
- Annual performance bonus
- Equity
- Competitive benefits package
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
