Tech Lead Manager - ML Autonomy Performance

Wayve

Hybrid
Location
Sunnyvale, California USA
Level
Senior
Category
Engineering
Salary
$370K – $394.9K / year
Posted
Oct 13, 2026 (8 days ago)

About the job

Before the detail, here's the challenge you'd help us solve.

We build the embodied intelligence that moves real vehicles safely, and the ecosystem a billion machines will run on in the future. Very few people in AI can say this. Every role here, whatever the team, plugs into that.

Here’s what this particular role covers.

🛠️ About our Driving Product Team

The Driving team owns Wayve's core end-to-end driving model, which directly shapes how our vehicles behave on the road. We take the backbone models and build the driving heads on top, and ship them into vehicles. That makes us the team closest to production. Our work is central to Wayve's Robotaxi launches around the world, so it ties directly to our near-term commercial milestones. We iterate fast: we find the top issues we see on the road, find their root causes, and fix them through data, model and evaluation changes. We work closely with other teams to solve issues that span the model and the vehicle.

🧠 Your day-to-day

  • Lead a small team (up to five people) iterating on Robotaxi driving performance, balancing hands-on technical work with people leadership

  • Diagnose the highest-impact issues seen on the road, find their root causes and resolve them through data and model iteration

  • Own changes to data recipes, model architecture, evaluation and release readiness for the driving model

  • Partner with other teams to resolve cross-functional issues, including model and vehicle interface problems

  • Be one of the team's key hands-on developers, writing code and running experiments while setting the team's priorities

🧩 What you’ll be working on

  • The end-to-end driving model that powers Wayve's Robotaxi product as it launches around the world

  • Scaling driving performance across cities and vehicle platforms while hitting performance and compliance KPIs

  • Data-led iteration: using on-road and off-road evaluation to find the biggest performance gaps and close them

  • Working with specialists across the business to resolve model and vehicle interface issues

  • Growing and shaping a small, high-impact team as the Robotaxi programme scales

🙌 You should apply if

Essential

  • You've managed engineers before and want to lead a team while staying deeply technical. This is a Tech Lead Manager role, not a pure management role

  • You're highly technical and hands-on: comfortable writing Python and doing model and data iteration yourself, not just directing others

  • You've delivered deployed, production ML models, or productionized ML at another company and improved a live system step by step over time

  • Your experience is focused on production rather than mainly on research or early-stage exploration

Desirable

  • You've shipped and iterated on ML for robotics, autonomous vehicles or other embodied AI

  • You've worked on end-to-end driving models or large-scale model training

🌱 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:

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This is a preview. The full description is on Wayve's careers page, linked from the Apply button.