Head of Model Dev Platform

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.  

About us   

Founded in 2017, Wayve is the leading developer of Embodied AI technology.  Our advanced AI software and foundation models enable vehicles to perceive, understand, and navigate any complex environment, enhancing the usability and safety of automated driving systems.

Our vision is to create autonomy that propels the world forward.  Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic AI products are designed for automakers, accelerating the transition from assisted to automated driving. 

In our fast-paced environment big problems ignite us—we embrace uncertainty, leaning into complex challenges to unlock groundbreaking solutions. We aim high and stay humble in our pursuit of excellence, constantly learning and evolving as we pave the way for a smarter, safer future.

At Wayve, your contributions matter.  We value diversity, embrace new perspectives, and foster an inclusive work environment; we back each other to deliver impact.  

Make Wayve the experience that defines your career!  

The role 

As the Head of Model Dev Platform you will architect and oversee the end-to-end infrastructure that powers every stage of Wayve’s model-development lifecycle—from raw data ingestion to on-road experiment execution and results analytics. Sitting at the nexus of AI research, large-scale data processing, and autonomous-vehicle operations, you will set the vision, strategy, and culture for multiple platform teams whose products enable hundreds of developers and thousands of robots to learn faster, test safer, and ship smarter. Your leadership will turn fragmented workflows into a cohesive, observable, and highly available platform that measurably accelerates model iteration velocity and unlocks new autonomous-driving capabilities.

Challenges you will own

• Organisational & Technical Strategy - Define the long-term roadmap for the team in support of user needs and company goals and reconcile the roadmap with technical needs such as scaling infrastructure and addressing technical debt.
• Unified Experiment Workflow - Deliver a first-class web console and API that allow researchers to design, launch, monitor, and analyse millions of experiments and simulation/​road tests with minimal friction.
• Compute Orchestration at Scale - Optimise allocation of GPU and CPU clusters, balancing cost, priority, and safety constraints while maximising utilisation and turnaround time.
• Petabyte-Scale Data Processing - Own the health, efficiency, and schema integrity of petabyte-scale ingestion pipelines, including third-party datasets and on-vehicle generated data, guaranteeing that every downstream training job sees the right data at the right time.
• Training CI & Artifact Management - Establish reproducible model-training workflows, lineage tracking, and automated licensing checks so that any model artefact can be traced, reproduced, and promoted to production with confidence.
• Platform Reliability & Observability - Build and lead an engineering organisation that provides 24 / 7 support and builds self-healing, highly observable systems meeting rigorous SLAs for uptime, latency, and data correctness.
• Cross-functional Partnership - Collaborate daily with AI research, autonomy, validation, and vehicle-operations teams to translate cutting-edge ideas into production-ready tools and iterate on feedback rapidly.
• People & Culture - Recruit, mentor, and retain diverse talent across software engineering, data engineering, ML infrastructure, and SRE. Foster an inclusive, high-ownership environment that values safety, learning, and operational excellence.

About you  

In order to set you up for success as a Head of Model Dev Platform at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.  

Essential

• Proven Platform Leadership – 8 + years directing multi-disciplinary engineering organisations (50 + engineers) that build and operate large-scale data, training, or experimentation platforms; at least 3 + years at senior-manager or director level.
• Deep Technical Breadth – Hands-on understanding of distributed data processing (Spark, Flink, Ray, Beam, etc), workflow orchestration (Flyte, Airflow,, etc), container/​cluster management (Kubernetes, Slurm, Nomad, etc), CI/​CD for ML (MLflow, Kubeflow, Metaflow, etc.), and full stack software development (React, Angular, etc), with the strong ability to integrate these varied disciplines into a coherent product. 
• Reliability Mindset – Demonstrated success delivering 99.9 % + SLA platforms with robust monitoring, alerting, incident response, and post-mortem culture.
• Strategic Vision & Execution – Ability to translate high-level business and research goals into an executable roadmap, balance short-term impact with long-term platform health, and communicate trade-offs to executives.
• Collaborative Influence – Exceptional communication and stakeholder-management skills; track record of aligning research, product, and operations groups behind a shared platform vision.
• Education – Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field required; advanced degree preferred or equivalent industry experience.
  
  

Desirable

• Experimentation & Fleet Operations Insight – Experience optimising usage of global compute fleets or hardware testbeds, ideally in robotics, autonomous driving, or similarly safety-critical domains.
• Industry Experience - Prior experience in autonomous-vehicle, aerospace, or other regulated safety-critical industries.
• Data Governance - Familiarity with data-privacy regulations and secure-compute practices for sensitive sensor data.
• Education – Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field required; advanced degree preferred or equivalent industry experience.
  
  

If you are passionate about building world-class platforms that turn vast streams of driving data into safe, intelligent behaviour on the road, we would love to meet you.

This is a full-time role based in our office in Sunnyvale, CA.  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.

 culture, relationships and learning, and time spent working from home.

We understand that everyone has a unique set of skills and experiences and that not everyone will meet all of the requirements listed above. If you’re passionate about self-driving cars and think you have what it takes to make a positive impact on the world, we encourage you to apply.

For more information visit Careers at Wayve. 

To learn more about what drives us, visit Values at Wayve 

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.