Engineering Director - Validation

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 developing next-generation autonomous driving technology, to enable autonomous transportation services.  Our team is the first in the world to use autonomous vehicles on public roads using end-to-end deep learning. With our multi-national world-class technical team, we’re building things differently.  We don’t think it’s scalable to tell an algorithm how to drive through hand-coded rules and expensive HD maps. Instead, we believe that using experience and data will allow our algorithms to be more intelligent: capable of easily adapting to new environments.

As Director of Engineering, you will lead and expand the Validation division within our Engineering organization, reporting to the VP of Engineering. This pivotal role is essential for the commercialization of our technology and, consequently, the company's success. Your efforts will be crucial in transforming an impressive demo into a globally trusted product for OEMs and millions of their customers worldwide. Furthermore, as the industry transitions from programmatic to fully learned autonomy, you will play a leading role in establishing AI trust and safety by meeting AV industry requirements through AI-powered simulation and scenario generation technology.

Key responsibilities:

• Define and own the technical vision, strategy and metrics for your area, ensuring its teams and the rest of Wayve are aligned and galvanised.
• Design and grow a Validation engineering organisation covering model releases and system level validation.
• Cover all our AV product requirements (safety, utility, comfort) on a set of reference platforms with automated tests. Partner with Product management leadership to converge quickly on which Validation methods are technically feasible, practical and efficient.
• Help our Application Engineering teams scale our Validation from reference platforms to specific OEM vehicle implementations.
• Find architectural and implementation gaps throughout our systems – including AI models, data quality, measurement accuracy, simulator reality gaps.
• Drive requirements into our tooling development – simulators, generative AI, scenario understanding.
• Partner with the senior leadership team to maintain a culture of impact, performance, and health.
• Build technical capabilities across the division and develop talented engineers as Wayve grows. Build resilient and reliable systems, teams and individuals.
• Work closely with team members to develop career plans and growth trajectories based on each individual’s strengths and weaknesses and their own aspirations.

About you  

In order to set you up for success as the engineering Validation leader at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.  

Essential 

• Management: 3+ years of leading complex teams with multiple management layers.
• Domain knowledge: validation methods – by design, system decomposition, traceability, statistical approaches.
• Domain knowledge: neural net understanding/introspection and/or validation.
• Domain knowledge: robotics including computer vision and motion – scenario understanding and simulation.
• Execution skills: resource allocation, program planning and execution.
• Engineering skills: code development practices, testing, serviceability.
• Product delivery skills: roadmap articulation, interface with leadership & cross-functional departments.
• Education: BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or similar experience.

Desirable 

• Responsible for Validation throughout the Automotive program lifecycle.
• Industry experience with Computer Vision with real-world product impact.
• Industry experience in Robotics, particularly related to simulating robots.
• Experience with cloud platforms, databases, large scale data pipelines.

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