The Readiness & Response Team keeps Zoox's robotaxi fleet moving. Readiness prepares vehicles for service; Response protects the mission once vehicles are live — recovering vehicles, recovering riders, and coordinating incident response across every market we operate. When a robotaxi needs help on public roads, Response is what gets there, and our dispatchers are the nerve center that makes it happen.
As Program Manager, Response, you own the Response program end to end and lead the centralized dispatch team that runs it. You will not lead crews in the field — market leadership owns field execution. You own dispatch, the recovery vendor network, the metric set, and the standards that make Response work the same way in Las Vegas as it does in Atlanta. This is a builder's role in a program scaling toward a national footprint without scaling headcount at the same rate, and you will spend as much time designing how the work should be done as you will running it.
In this role, you will:
Lead the dispatch team: Manage, coach, and develop a team of Readiness and Response Dispatchers providing 24-hour coverage across all markets — including hiring, shift structure, scheduling, on-call rotation, and performance management.
Own Response program execution: Drive the four pillars of the program — vehicle recovery, rider recovery, incident response, and dispatch and oversight — across San Francisco, Foster City, Las Vegas, Austin, Miami, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, and stand the program up in each new market we launch.
Run the recovery vendor network: Hold third-party tow and rider recovery partners to their service levels through scorecards, escalation, and capacity planning, partnering with Logistics on contracts and Finance on cost per recovery.
Own the metrics: Define, instrument, and report the Response metric set — time to dispatch, dispatch to cleared scene, dispatch cancellation rate, recovery SLA attainment, recovery damage events, and cost per recovery — and use it to drive decisions rather than describe them.
Standardize the work: Support authoring and maintaining the workflows, escalation matrices, and management-of-change process that keep Response consistent across markets — build once, deploy everywhere.
Close the loop on incidents: Run post-incident retrospectives to a real standard — containment, solution, preventive action — and make sure the assigned actions actually land.
Partner across the stack: Work with Mission Control, GSOC, the Fusion Center, Safety, Product, and market leadership to remove the friction that shows up between the dispatch decision and the cleared scene.
Communicate up and out: Deliver the weekly Response update to leadership and represent the program in business reviews — TL;DR first, data-backed, no surprises.
Qualifications
5+ years of program or project management experience in live operations — field operations, logistics, transportation, emergency services, or fleet.
Bachelor's degree in business management, operations, or a similar field discipline
Direct people leadership experience: hiring, coaching, and managing a team through a 24/7 shift-based schedule.
Demonstrated experience running real-time dispatch, command center, or incident response operations, including remaining decisive under pressure and interfacing with external parties during live events.
Proven track record of building operational processes from scratch and driving adoption across multiple sites or markets.
Experience managing third-party vendors to measurable performance standards — service levels, scorecards, escalation, and capacity coverage.
Fluency with operational data: able to define a metric, source it from a dashboard, and defend the conclusion. Experience with Looker, Databricks, Jira, or equivalent tooling.
Excellent written communication — able to compress a messy operating week into a briefing an executive reads in ninety seconds.
Willingness to travel to markets (20% – 25%) and to be reachable for major incidents outside of standard hours.
Bonus Qualifications
Experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or another safety-critical operating environment.
Formal incident management training (ICS / NIMS) or a public safety, EMS, or emergency dispatch background.
Experience standing up operations in new geographies or supporting new market launches.
Experience with workforce planning or labor modeling for shift-based teams.
