Engineering Manager, AI Synthesis

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 an Engineering Manager for AI Synthesis, you will build and lead a new team of world class machine learning engineers and software developers to transform cutting edge generative AI research into production systems that power the evaluation of Wayve’s driving intelligence. Your team is productising GAIA, Wayve’s foundation model for synthetic multimodal video, into tools that generate richly realistic and highly controllable data to test and validate our autonomous driving system.
• This is a uniquely exciting opportunity to work at the intersection of generative video, 3D reconstruction, and robotics. The AI Synthesis team is developing infrastructure to scale synthetic data generation for both open loop analysis and closed loop simulation, and evolving the underlying models themselves to improve performance, realism, and control. Your work will help test safety critical behaviors of our embodied AI system by generating sensor data across multiple modalities (RGB camera, radar, lidar) at scale.
• You’ll collaborate closely with the research teams pioneering future architectures for synthetic view generation and domain adaptation, while owning the engineering roadmap to integrate these breakthroughs into high performance, production ready internal tools. Strong ML Ops capabilities: model training pipelines, versioning, deployment, and monitoring, will be key to your team’s success. You’ll also partner with experts across cloud infrastructure, evaluation tooling, and robotics simulation to ensure AI Synthesis delivers data and tooling with measurable impact on autonomy system performance.
• You’ll bring engineering discipline to a rapidly evolving field, help shape our product vision for synthetic data, and build a team capable of delivering one of the most advanced simulation data pipelines in the world.

Challenges you will own

• Define and drive the engineering roadmap for synthetic data generation using generative AI, evolving both model and infrastructure to meet the testing and evaluation needs of Wayve’s autonomous driving system
• Lead technical discussions across research and engineering, and guide architectural and implementation decisions across model training, deployment, and data delivery pipelines
• Set effective KPIs and metrics to evaluate model quality, generation throughput, coverage, and overall impact on system evaluation
• Build scalable, reliable systems and teams, anticipate the needs of the business 18 months out, identify areas where investment is needed, and grow the team as hiring manager
• Prioritise effectively, implement and maintain lean, ML-ops friendly team processes that support both iterative model development and robust internal tool delivery
• Communicate clearly and proactively with internal customers and collaborators across ML research, simulation, infrastructure, and evaluation to ensure alignment
• Work closely with team members to develop tailored career plans and growth trajectories in a fast-moving and technically ambitious environment
• Foster a strong culture of engineering and ML excellence through design reviews, shared tooling, and technical mentorship
• Partner with leadership to maintain a culture of impact, performance, and long-term team health

About You

Essential 

• Proven track record of managing high-performing machine learning engineering teams
• Strong understanding of generative AI, including experience with model training and deployment
• Experience with roadmap planning, stakeholder management, requirements gathering, and alignment with peers towards milestones and deliverables
• Demonstrated ability to guide the development and operationalisation of ML models, with attention to model lifecycle, reliability, and performance
• Track record of promoting software engineering and ML Ops best practices within the team, including CI/CD for models, model versioning, data pipelines, and monitoring
• Demonstrated ability to manage and mentor engineers across levels, helping them grow technically and professionally
• Solid coding fundamentals and familiarity with building robust systems for ML workflows

Desirable 

• Experience collaborating with research teams and transferring novel architectures into production-grade systems
• Experience working with generative video models, such as diffusion models, GANs, or NeRF-based architectures
• Understanding of or interest in incorporating physics-based constraints into generative models
• Experience leading teams developing multi-sensor synthetic data pipelines or simulation components
• Familiarity with high-performance training and inference pipelines at scale, especially in cloud or distributed environments
• Experience with 3D vision, view synthesis, or synthetic data for ML model training
• Hands-on experience building systems in Python, and optionally C++ or CUDA for performance-critical components

#LI-FH1

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.