Senior Robotics Engineer - Autonomy

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 a Senior Robotics Engineer in the Autonomy group, you’ll play a key role in shaping how our vehicles move, respond, and interact with the road environment. You’ll be responsible for delivering robust low-level control and motion execution that directly impacts driving comfort and safety, while also enabling new user-facing capabilities such as configurable driving modes and behavior personalization. Working across simulation, real-world testing, and platform integration, this role gives you the opportunity to drive real impact across our R&D and production autonomy stack.

Key responsibilities:

• Own the interface between robot software and low-level vehicle control systems, ensuring reliable and safe actuation for both baseline and feature-driven behaviors.
• Design, test, and tune control strategies for drive-by-wire and motion execution to achieve smooth, stable, and precise driving performance across multiple driving modes and feature configurations.
• Collaborate with internal feature teams to support the deployment and validation of user-facing features (e.g., comfort modes, assertiveness profiles, personalization) on-road and in simulation.
• Work with suppliers and partners to ensure successful drive-by-wire integration for our future platforms — enabling consistency across platforms for both control and behavior-level features.
• Keep our internal R&D fleet safe and functional with regards to motion control and drive-by-wire, and support rollout of feature experiments at scale.
• Support performance evaluation of new vehicle platforms during bring-up and AV stack integration, including validation of control and feature interaction.
• Develop and validate control loops (longitudinal and lateral) that connect the AV stack to vehicle actuation — ensuring responsiveness to upstream planning and feature logic.
• Interface with third parties to specify, integrate, and validate low-level control system requirements, with flexibility to support evolving feature definitions.
• Contribute to hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and software-in-the-loop (SIL) testbeds for control verification, feature evaluation, and safety assurance.

About you  

We’re looking for someone who thrives at the intersection of robotics systems, autonomy engineering, and fast-paced feature iteration. You care about technical quality, but also about enabling new use cases and unlocking great AV experiences.

Essential 

• Practical experience with controls engineering in robotics or automotive applications.
• Strong grasp of control theory (PID, state estimation, observers, MPC, stability analysis).
• Hands-on experience with testing, tuning, and debugging real-time control software on hardware platforms.
• Systems thinking: can quickly understand how the AV stack components interact to achieve driving performance.
• Experience with CAN bus (DBC files, interface scripts, signal analysis).
• Hands-on with control system design and tuning for robotics/vehicle applications.
• Experience with HIL testing of embedded systems.
• Comfort with defining and verifying requirements for both platform and feature-driven controls
• Strong software engineering skills (Python; comfortable in C++), daily Linux use.

Desirable 

• Experience writing and testing embedded control software for automotive/robotics.
• Familiarity with the software V-lifecycle and safety-critical development frameworks (ISO 26262, MISRA).
• MATLAB/Simulink for control design and rapid prototyping.
• Experience with ROS 2, Rust, or other modern robotics frameworks/systems
  
  

This is a full-time role based in our office in London, UK or Sunnyvale, USA.  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 operate core working hours so you can determine the schedule that works best for you and your team.  

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.