Engineering Director – Evaluation and Validation

Who we are

Established in 2017, Wayve is a leader in autonomous vehicle technology, driven by breakthroughs in Embodied AI. Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic technologies empower vehicles to navigate complex environments effortlessly. 

Supported by prominent investors, Wayve is advancing the transition from assisted to fully automated driving, making transportation safer, more efficient, and universally accessible. Join our world-class, multinational team of engineers and researchers as we push the boundaries of frontier AI and autonomous driving, creating impactful technologies and products on a global scale

The impact you will have

As Director of Engineering you will manage the Evaluation and Validation group within our Software Engineering organisation. You will report to the VP of Software who reports to the CEO.  There are four R&D groups in the Software department:

• Cloud Infrastructure (data and ML training infra)
• Onboard Software (the car computer system software)
• Embodied AI Products (the AI+Robotics autonomy software and data)
• Evaluation and Validation (make our AI easy to measure and then prove it is safe)

The Evaluation and Validation group is on the critical path to company success.  Your mission is (1) to enable Wayve to iterate quickly towards solving Autonomy problems and (2) to make our AI products trusted by our commercial partners and end users.  You will be responsible for defining and building a development and validation toolkit and process for our Embodied AI technology.  Today that includes Simulation (digitise the self-driving problem in order to enable the creation of new training and validation datasets), Experiments (essentially the Embodied AI development toolkit), Data Science (measurement reliability and accuracy in noisy self-driving environments).  You will need to develop additional capabilities to evaluate model performance and validate its safety across a large corpus of recorded and synthesised scenarios. 

You can expect to:

• Define and own the technical vision, strategy and metrics for your area, ensuring its teams and the rest of Wayve are aligned and galvanised
• Digitise the self-driving problem. Greatly improve our ability to predict and compare on-road performance through off-road simulation
• Build efficient off-road open-loop and closed-loop tools for safety validation
• Partner with the senior leadership team to maintain a culture of impact, performance, and health
• Build technical capabilities across the division and develop talented engineers as Wayve grows. Build resilient and reliable systems, teams and individuals
• Work closely with team members to develop career plans and growth trajectories based on each individual’s strengths

Challenges you will own

• Growing the team from about 25 to 50 engineers the first 12 months with potential for significant growth thereafter.
• You are expected to establish solid software and ML practices from the start and to attract technical leadership
• You will set the technical direction in your area and ensure that deliverables align with company objectives.
• You will provide leadership and guidance to the Engineering Managers within your area. You will steer the teams and coordinate with others across Wayve.
• You will partner with our Science department to stay on top of the latest advances and bring those quickly to production.

You will be essential to Wayve’s mission, deeply enjoy what you do, take immense pride in being a part of something big, and love pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

This role will be based at our headquarters near King’s Cross in London, or in Mountain View, CA.

What you will bring to Wayve

Essential

• Management: 2+ years of leading teams of 50+ engineers at large companies or 25+ at startups
• Execution skills: resource allocation, program planning and execution
• Domain skills: neural net understanding/introspection and/or validation
• Domain skills: simulation of embodied/physical systems
• Engineering skills: code development practices, testing, serviceability
• Product delivery skills: roadmap articulation, interface with leadership & business functions
• Education: BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or similar experience

Desirable

• Industry experience in Robotics, particularly related to simulating robots
• Industry experience with Computer Vision with real-world product impact
• Experience with cloud platforms, databases, large scale data pipelines

What we offer you

• The chance to be part of a truly mission driven organisation and an opportunity to shape the future of autonomous driving.  Unlike our competitors, Wayve is still relatively small and nimble, giving you the chance to make a huge impact
• Competitive compensation
• Fully employer-covered medical, dental and vision insurance!
• Further benefits such as catered lunch, yummy snacks, and variety of drinks, life insurance, employer contributed retirement account, therapy, yoga, office-wide socials and much more.
• A dynamic and fast-paced work environment in which you will grow every day - learning on the job, from the brightest minds in our space, and with support for more formal learning opportunities too
• A culture that is ego-free, respectful and welcoming (of you and your dog) - we even eat lunch together every day
• This is a full-time role based in our office in California. At Wayve we want the best of all worlds so we operate a hybrid working policy that combines time together in our offices and workshops to fuel innovation, culture, relationships and learning, and time spent working from home.  We also operate core working hours so you can be where you need to be for family and loved ones too.  Teams determine the routines that work best for them.

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 gender, gender identity, gender expression, race, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, ethnicity, age, religious belief, marital status, protected veteran status, or any other legally protected status.

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.