Tech Lead - Pretraining Team, Wayve Foundation Model

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 

This is a rare opportunity to lead foundational work at the intersection of large-scale pretraining and embodied AI. You’ll shape how Wayve curates and experiments with data to pretrain the next generation of multi-modal foundation models for autonomy. Working at the frontier of a still-undefined field, you’ll collaborate with research and engineering teams to define what “good data” looks like for embodied systems — and work with engineering teams to build the infrastructure to scale it. Your work will directly influence the performance, generalization, and capabilities of Wayve’s AI stack.

Key responsibilities:

• Lead data curation, enrichment, and filtering efforts for large-scale pretraining of embodied models
• Build and manage distributed data processing and ingestion pipelines across modalities
• Partner with research teams to run data-centric experiments and influence model training strategy
• Identify, integrate, and leverage third-party datasets to enhance pretraining and evaluation
• Manage and mentor a team of engineers and data scientists to deliver scientific and technical impact

What you’ll bring to Wayve 

In order to set you up for success as a Tech Lead / Tech Lead Manager at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience:

Essential

• Leadership in data-centric AI: Experience leading research or engineering teams focused on dataset curation, filtering, or enrichment at scale, particularly for large-scale model pretraining.
• Contributions to data benchmarks or tools: Involvement in projects like DataComp, LAION, DINO, MOLMO, or equivalent initiatives that define or evaluate pretraining dataset quality.
• Deep understanding of distributed data processing: Strong working knowledge of frameworks such as Ray, Spark, Dask, or equivalent, and designing scalable, fault-tolerant data pipelines.
• Hands-on deep learning expertise: Strong proficiency in PyTorch and a solid grasp of how data quality, distribution, and structure impact training dynamics and model generalisation.
• Experimental mindset: Demonstrated ability to run and interpret data-centric experiments (e.g., small-scale trials, ablations) to inform large-scale model training.
• Collaboration with research: Experience working closely with ML researchers and contributing to experimental design, pretraining strategies, or evaluation design.
• Minimum 5 years of relevant industry experience: Including at least several years in data-heavy, model-driven environments involving deep learning at scale.
  
  

Nice to have

• Track record of research impact: Publications in top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, CoRL, or equivalent, especially in data-centric learning, representation learning, or self-supervised learning.
• People management experience: Track record managing ~5 direct reports in a research or research-leaning engineering environment; skilled in team development, prioritization, and technical alignment.
• Experience with multi-modal or embodied systems: Familiarity with datasets involving video, language, lidar, radar and generally sensor fusion or embodied perception and control.
• Tooling and infrastructure know-how: Familiarity with modern data versioning, annotation, and orchestration tools (e.g., Weights & Biases, ClearML, Labelbox, Airflow, Metaflow, etc.).
• Autonomous systems exposure: While prior AV or robotics experience is not required, a demonstrated interest in embodied intelligence or real-world agent learning is a plus.
• Systems thinking and data-product intuition: Ability to reason about upstream data decisions and their downstream effects on models, infrastructure, and product goals.

What we offer you 

• Attractive compensation with salary and equity 
• Immersion in a team of world-class researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs 
• A unique position to shape the future of autonomy and tackle the biggest challenge of our time 
• Bespoke learning and development opportunities 
• Relocation support with visa sponsorship 
• Flexible working hours - we trust you to do your job well, at times that suit you and your time 
• Benefits such as an onsite chef, workplace nursery scheme, private health insurance, therapy, daily yoga, onsite bar, large social budgets, unlimited L&D requests, enhanced parental leave, and more!

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