Lead Architect: Wayve Portal

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 

Wayve is seeking a Lead Architect to define and lead the system architecture of the Wayve Portal—a secure, cloud-based SaaS platform that enables partners to access software releases, performance data, and transfer data efficiently. The platform will also provide services for validation, AI training, and data curation, empowering partners to independently develop autonomous driving AI.

You will act as the technical authority for architectural integrity across all modules, collaborating with third-party engineering teams. This role ensures a robust, modular, and scalable architecture that meets enterprise-grade security and performance standards across diverse OEM environments.

Key responsibilities:

• Architect the full-stack Wayve Portal platform across frontend, backend, APIs, IAM, observability, and cloud infrastructure.
• Design for scalability, modularity, and high availability, supporting both managed service and OEM self-service deployment models.
• Maintain the architecture blueprint and decision log; own schema definitions and interface contracts.
• Define and uphold non-functional requirements (NFRs) including performance, security, availability, and disaster recovery.
• Partner with IAM and Security teams to validate authentication workflows, RBAC policies, token lifecycle management, and audit mechanisms.
• Ensure architectural compliance with relevant standards and regulations (e.g., GDPR, ISO 27001), embedding privacy-by-design and auditability across the platform.
• Oversee CI/CD workflows to ensure compliance with penetration testing and SLA requirements.
• Review and approve technical designs from third-party development teams, enforcing consistency and best practices.
• Lead architecture and code design reviews; ensure adherence to architectural guardrails and quality standards.
• Define integration patterns for third-party tools (e.g., Databricks, Sigma, Jama) and guide their secure implementation.
• Shape the cloud infrastructure strategy with a preference for Azure, while maintaining cloud-agnostic design principles.
• Support environment provisioning (dev, staging, production), build pipeline setup, and observability tooling strategy.
• Make technical decisions around data storage models, API gateway architecture, caching layers, and deployment orchestration.
  
  

Success in This Role Means

• The Wayve Portal’s architecture remains scalable and resilient, even as it grows to support multiple OEMs.
• Engineering vendors deliver secure, maintainable, and performant code that aligns with architectural guidance.
• Technical debt is actively avoided, and onboarding new OEMs or services is seamless and predictable.

 

About you  
In order to set you up for success as a Lead architect of Wayve Portal  at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience:

Essential

• 8+ years of experience in solution architecture, with recent focus on cloud-native, enterprise-grade SaaS platforms
• Strong foundation in modern web architectures, including RESTful APIs, microservices, and containerized applications
• Deep expertise in security and access control frameworks (e.g., OAuth2, SAML, SSO, token-based authentication, audit logging)
• Proven ability to design scalable, resilient systems using Azure, Kubernetes, or comparable cloud and orchestration technologies
• Experience leading or collaborating with external engineering teams or consulting partners
• Demonstrated ability to translate business requirements and product workflows into technical architectures and infrastructure designs
• Track record of architecting robust B2B SaaS solutions for enterprise clients
• Experience designing secure, multi-tenant systems that isolate customer/OEM data while optimizing resource efficiency
  
  

Desirable

• Familiarity with the autonomous driving or automotive software domain
• Exposure to AI development workflows, including model training, validation, and data curation pipelines
• Hands-on experience in greenfield (0→1) design of enterprise-grade SaaS platforms
• Experience integrating with tools such as Databricks, Jira, Sigma, or Jama

 

This is a full-time role based in our office in London.  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 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 

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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.