Job Description
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 directly to our Managing Counsel.
You will:
- Serve as lead attorney on a wide range of Japan and greater APAC related projects, and provide the full range of supporting legal services to other global Legal teams, including commercial deals, advocacy, event response, employment, and dispute resolution, in support of Waymo’s success in the region.
- Provide strategic guidance to key cross-functional internal stakeholders on a wide range of legal, business, corporate strategy and governance issues relevant to Japan and the greater APAC region.
- Work closely with key partners such as public policy, public affairs, product counsels, regulatory counsels, communications, compliance and others to jointly develop and implement winning strategies, including representing Waymo in interactions with local agencies and organizations as required.
- Support cross-functional global teams with navigating country/region specific laws and regulations, including coordinating internally and externally to closely monitor, review, report on, and shape changing laws and regulations in Japan and the greater APAC region relevant to Waymo’s business.
- Gain subject matter expertise in new areas as novel regional issues and topics emerge.
- Support compliance and other corporate governance tasks related to Japan and the greater APAC region.
You have:
- Law degree (LLB, LLM or JD)
- Admitted to practice law in Japan
- At least 8 years of experience practicing law, 4 of which involve practicing law in Japan
- Experience assisting international technology companies with introducing novel products and services into Japan and other APAC countries
- Experience engaging Japanese and other APAC regulators on a range of topics
- Fluent in Japanese and English
We prefer:
- Experience working in the automotive industry or ride-hailing industry
- Experience working as an in house counsel
- Additionally admitted to practice law in another country in the APAC region
- Fluency in one or more additional languages spoken in the APAC region
- At least 15 years of experience practicing law
- Demonstrated experience working with international legal teams and clients
Travel Requirements:
- Travel required, primarily within APAC and occasionally to the US
