npelly
Zoox is building a fleet of autonomous vehicles.
Zoox is hiring across a range of roles - from Manufacturing Engineers to Machine Learning experts. See https://jobs.lever.co/zoox for the full menu.
I am hiring manager for teams needing Generalist SWEs, Infra Software Engineers, Android Engineers & Front-end Engineers. For these roles you can contact me direct at npelly(at)zoox.com.
I expect a startup was the only option to execute on the idea with a decent level of autonomy. Google/Alphabet already have well established teams in the areas of mapping & autonomous driving so you can't just go ahead and start your own multi-engineer effort.
Hiring managers / hiring committees for technical positions at the big-5 are made up of peer engineers and managers (not recruiters or executives). So they hire the best person for the job because they're likely to be working alongside.
I haven't come across situations where there are direct diversity incentives at the point where the hiring decision is made. Sure, there's probably indirect incentives, but I don't think they're as strong as your suggesting.
The playbook is to aggressively attract female (and other diversity) candidates into the top of the hiring funnel, but keep the hiring bar equal.
Source - I used to be a hiring manager at a similar large-cap tech company.
Take Android Wear. It took the DAL approach. As a result, O/S upgrades are immediately available to all devices (awesome!). But there is very little differentiation - all Wear devices use the same small set of SoC's and peripherals, and are functionally the same. Google decides on HW innovations.
(This was true of Wear 1.0, not sure if changed with Wear 2.0)