Senior Staff Technical Program Manager - Release Management

Who We Are

Aurora (Nasdaq: AUR) is delivering the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly to make transportation safer, increasingly accessible, and more reliable and efficient than ever before. The Aurora Driver is a self-driving system designed to operate multiple vehicle types, from freight-hauling semi-trucks to ride-hailing passenger vehicles, and underpins Aurora Horizon and Aurora Connect, its driver-as-a-service products for trucking and ride-hailing. Aurora is working with industry leaders across the transportation ecosystem, including Toyota, FedEx, Volvo Trucks, PACCAR, Uber, Uber Freight, U.S. Xpress, Werner, Covenant, Schneider, and Ryder. For Aurora’s latest news, visit aurora.tech and @aurora_inno on Twitter.

Aurora hires talented people with diverse backgrounds who are ready to help build a transportation ecosystem that will make our roads safer, get crucial goods where they need to go, and make mobility more efficient and accessible for all. We’re searching for a Senior Staff Technical Program Manager - Release Management.

In this role, you’ll drive the vision, definition, implementation, and execution of release processes for autonomous driving systems. You’ll partner with our release engineering team and broader software organization to define and build the infrastructure and tooling needed to deliver the latest software to our fleet and customers. You’ll partner with teams across the company to define, operationalize, and execute an mature, efficient, and well understood release process for a high quality, safety critical system.

In this role, you will 

• Define and drive broad alignment on the vision, requirements, and roadmap for safety critical release process and infrastructure. Implement and champion broad release process changes, ensuring they are broadly understood, robust, and executing efficiently. You are a go to process driver for release management processes across the company.
• Ensure software releases are shipping - moving through simulated and on road testing, verification and validation processes, and getting to an approved state, with high levels of confidence and stability. Collaborate with a wide range of teams across the company to get software release issues tracked to completion, including Software, Hardware, Product, Operations, and Safety. 
• Track and broadly communicate product and feature release status, facilitate release readiness and release/change control reviews, and coordinate product release activities.
• Work with our external partners and internal stakeholders to drive alignment on joint release processes.
• Proactively remove obstacles to drive momentum and progress, identify gaps in communication related to release management across the organization.

Required Qualifications

• Minimum 7 years of experience leading release engineering or release management for a complex commercial product with both software and hardware components.
• Ability to define and drive strategic change while also directly managing day to day release management processes and resolving day to day issues as needed.
• Experience leading a structured release cadence that involves building releases and tracking them through their testing phases to production.
• Experience working with continuous integration (CI) build systems and/or release crafting systems in multi-faceted, large-scale software development environments (Buildkite / Github).
• Experience orchestrating cross-team efforts to address bugs and issues to resolution.
• Communication skills for a broad range of audiences: executives, individual engineers, larger technical teams, operations teams, external partners.
• Able to travel to operations centers as needed (limited expectation).

Desirable Qualifications

• Experience in release engineering or release management for a safety critical product.
• Experience with formal verification and validation processes.
• Familiarity with safety and systems engineering best practices.
• Familiarity with quality and safety standards for automotive, aerospace, or medical.
• Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, machine learning.
• Experience with a monorepo based build tool such as Bazel.
• Familiarity with modern cloud-based software development (AWS).
• Familiarity with modern web development technologies.

The base salary range for this position is $177K-$284K per year. Aurora’s pay ranges are de