You’ll also coordinate dependencies across teams, make priorities and trade-offs clear, and resolve risks early. The role combines software engineering leadership with practical delivery and execution.
🧩 What you’ll be working on
Leading and developing engineers: Set clear expectations, run effective one-to-ones, provide regular feedback, manage performance and support career progression.
Building the team: Own hiring and onboarding, develop the skills needed for future programmes and build a collaborative culture across locations.
Setting direction and priorities: Maintain the team’s mission, ownership boundaries and roadmap, balancing programme commitments with improvements that make future integrations easier.
Delivering new vehicle integrations: Lead planning and execution from early preparation and bench integration through vehicle bring-up, validation and handover. Secure the resources and cross-team support needed for delivery.
Owning vehicle-facing software: Guide the architecture and development of Vehicle Driver and drive-by-wire components, building robust interfaces that reduce bespoke changes for each vehicle variant.
Improving reliability and release quality: Establish measurable reliability targets, use field feedback to prioritise improvements, and build strong ownership of testing, releases and escalated issues. Invest in sustainable over the air updatable infrastructure.
Making integration repeatable: Develop playbooks, tooling, runbooks and knowledge-transfer practices so subsequent vehicles can be commissioned and supported independently.
Driving technical collaboration: Review designs and work closely with software, hardware, controls, safety and operations teams, as well as customers and suppliers where needed, to resolve integration challenges.
🙌 You should apply if
You have a strong track record of leading and developing software or systems engineering teams, including coaching, hiring, performance management and career development.
You have owned a team roadmap and delivered complex engineering programmes through others, managing priorities, resources, dependencies and technical risk.
You have practical experience developing and integrating embedded or robotics software in a physical product.
You can guide architectural decisions and review designs for software that interacts with hardware, balancing immediate delivery with maintainability and reuse.
You understand the challenges of bringing up new hardware and software platforms, including testing, fault diagnosis, validation and operational handover.
You build strong ownership of reliability and quality, using metrics and lessons from real-world operation to drive improvements.
You communicate clearly and can align teams with different priorities around shared technical outcomes.
Experience with automotive systems, drive-by-wire, CAN or automotive Ethernet, vehicle controls, or bench and hardware-in-the-loop testing is desirable.
🌱 Not ticking every box? That’s totally okay! If you’re passionate about autonomy and keen to learn, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement.
More about Wayve
🚀 Wayve is building the leading AI platform for autonomous driving. We are pioneering an end to end AI approach that enables vehicles to learn directly from real world experience, developing the ability to adapt, generalise and improve at scale. Instead of relying on hand coded rules or pre mapped environments, our AI Driver learns to drive by understanding the world around it. The result is technology that navigates complex urban environments with intelligence, precision and natural flow, unlocking meaningful advances in both safety and efficiency. We believe autonomy represents a once in a generation transformation in how people and goods move, comparable to the shift from horses to cars, and from human driven vehicles to intelligent machines.
Our ambition is to make autonomy universal. Wayve’s mapless and hardware agnostic AI platform integrates with global OEM partners, enabling continuous software evolution and unlocking advanced levels of automation from L2 plus through to L4 as our core AI model scales. In a race increasingly defined by intelligence and real world learning, Wayve is taking a distinct approach, building a generalisable driving intelligence that can power any vehicle, anywhere. By combining embodied AI with scalable deployment, we are creating technology that can be shaped to each OEM brand and driver experience, accelerating the transition to a safer, more intelligent future of mobility.
How we work 💻- Locations & Flexible Working
Our main hubs are in London, Sunnyvale, Yokohama, Herzliya, Vancouver and Leonberg. We operate a hybrid working model that combines in-person collaboration in our dedicated office spaces with focused time working remotely. This gives our teams the connection and energy of working together, alongside the flexibility to do their best work in a way that fits their lives.
🔍 The Interview Process
Our process is clear and respectful of your time
Initial call / recruiter screen (30 mins)
Competency Interviews (Programming and hiring manager interview; 2 hours total)
Deep-dive technical interviews (programming, systems & domain-specific interviews; 3 hours total)
Final interview: Wayve value alignment (45 mins)
We’ll always explain the format and work around your availability.
What’s in it for you (Location dependant)
- 💰 Salaries benchmarked against the market annually
- 📈 Meaningful equity, sharing in the ownership and long term success of Wayve
- ✈️ Relocation support and visa sponsorship where applicable
- ✅ Hybrid working, core hours and the chance to work hands on in vehicle workshops and labs
- 📚 Learning and development budgets with support for training, conferences and growth
- 🩺 Comprehensive benefits including health insurance, dental, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, retirement or pension where applicable, access to therapists, wellbeing partnerships, team socials and more
A quick, honest note before you apply.
Wayve is not a mature, fully-structured place with the playbook already written. Much of how we work is still being written, and if you join, you’ll help write it. That suits people who want real ownership more than people who need a settled structure from day one.
If that sounds like the kind of problem you want to spend your time on, we’d really like to hear from you.
At Wayve we're committed to creating a diverse, fair and respectful culture that is inclusive of everyone based on their unique skills and perspectives, and regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law.
For more information visit Careers at Wayve. https://wayve.ai/careers/ To learn more about what drives us, visit Values at Wayve https://wayve.ai/careers/
DISCLAIMER: We will not ask about marriage or pregnancy, care responsibilities or disabilities in any of our job adverts or interviews. However, we do look to capture information about care responsibilities, and disabilities among other diversity information as part of an optional DEI Monitoring form to help us identify areas of improvement in our hiring process and ensure that the process is inclusive and non-discriminatory.
