Jaime Waydo

Jaime brings her product and technology skills combined with her operational acumen to support CEOs and boards in transitioning technology into shipping at scale, driving efficiencies in the organization, and thinking through product and technology trades.

Jaime currently serves as a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Cavnue, an early stage startup building connected infrastructure technology to enable autonomous driving technology to ship at scale in the next few years.  She joined the company in early 2021 and is responsible for the Product, Technology, and Operations of Cavnue.  In just one year, Jaime has created a product vision and early technology roadmap that has resulted in a dramatic increase in company valuation.   Jaime also serves on the Cavnue board of directors.

Jaime brings strong experience across all phases of technology development.  At Apple she led the autonomous systems effort through a 10x improvement in a single year and helped bring to life the product vision that moved the program from research to project execution.  She then established the framework and strategy to deliver this safety critical product into a highly regulated environment.

At Waymo, Jaime created the safety strategy for launching driverless vehicles in both Texas and Arizona, working through local, state, and federal regulations as well as tying in to the marketing and product strategies for those launches.  Once launched in Arizona, Jaime led a 4 month effort to drive new software releases from 9 months down to 3 weeks allowing Waymo to ship new product features to customers every month at a scale never before possible.

Early career experience was as a mechanical engineer where Jaime was the lead mechanical systems engineer for the Mars Curiosity Rover that launched in 2011 and is still running today.  She also was the lead mechanical engineer at Hansen medical where she led the effort to redesign the robot that helped surgeons conduct AFib surgeries robotically.  She also worked as the lead engineer at Translucent medical where she built the first product that shipped and sold to hospitals across the world.  She later helped sell the IP of the company so she could pursue her passion of working on robots for mobility.

Jaime grew up in Montana on a potato farm.  She now lives in the Bay Area with her husband, two boys, and a dog.  She loves skiing, art, hiking, paddle boarding, and all things enjoying the great California outdoors.  

At a glance:

Companies	Cavnue (2021-2022): Chief Technology Officer Apple (2018-2021): Chief Engineer, Autonomous Systems Alphabet, Google X, Waymo Self Driving Car Program (2013-2018): Chief Systems Engineer, Launch Lead Translucent Medical: (2012-2013) Director Product Development Hansen Medical (2010-2012): Lead Engineer NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1999-2010): Chief Mechanical Systems Engineer, Curiosity Rover
Boards	Cavnue – startup board member California Transportation Foundation – non-profit independent director, co-chair Outreach & Communications committee Montana Space Grant Consortium – university non-profit, independent director, chair scholarship committee
Expertise	Building & Leading multidisciplinary teams that span product, engineering, operations, UI design, user experience, & program management Product Management & Design Engineering & Technology Development Program Management Operations (domestic & overseas) Regulatory & Safety Critical Systems; high reliability systems Systems Engineering / Verification & Validation / Integration & Test Scaling from prototypes to global
Industries	Automotive & Mobility Technology including, Self Driving, Robotics, & AI Medical Devices Regulated industries (vehicles, robotics, medical) Early stage startups through to large scale fortune 5 companies