Tech Lead / Manager - Trajectory Generation and Controls

The role 

In this role, you will lead Wayve’s Controls team, an experienced and growing group responsible for delivering robust real-world vehicle motion across our product platforms. You will guide a team working across controls, trajectory generation, and the interface with the Wayve AI Driver. The role combines technical leadership, team development, and delivery ownership, with the opportunity to shape both near-term product impact and the longer-term evolution of our technology.  This is a high-impact opportunity to lead a critical team at the intersection of control, AI, and real-world vehicle behavior.

Key responsibilities:

• Lead and develop the Motion Controls team, providing strong people leadership, technical direction, and clear priorities for an experienced and growing group of engineers.
• Own the team’s technical roadmap and delivery across short and long term horizons, translating product and system needs into clear priorities, technical plans, and timely execution.
• Own the interface between the Wayve AI Driver, trajectory generation, and control in a deployed autonomy system.
• Provide strong technical judgment across control, trajectory generation, and adjacent ML-informed system design, holding a high bar for engineering quality, technical rigor, deployed system performance, and motion quality.
• Work with key partners to align technical plans, product needs, and integration constraints in the delivery of robust deployed motion behavior.
• Shape the future direction and growth of the team to address emerging challenges at the intersection of control, AI, and real-world vehicle behavior.

About you  

In order to set you up for success as a TLM, Motion Controls at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.  

Essential 

• Experience managing or leading engineers including setting priorities, driving execution, and supporting their growth and performance.
• Experience leading technical direction for complex autonomy, robotics, or other physical AI systems, ideally in autonomous vehicles or a closely related domain.
• Experience building, shipping, and maintaining production systems, including translating product and system requirements into technical plans and execution.
• Expertise in controls, trajectory generation, motion planning, or closely related autonomy problems, including strong understanding of physical system dynamics, closed-loop behavior, and controller design tradeoffs.
• Experience working on production systems that incorporate machine learning models, ideally in domains such as prediction, trajectory generation, planning, or control.
• Experience working across system boundaries, with the ability to consider factors across software, platform, and physical boundaries.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with experience delivering high-quality production code and setting a high technical bar for others.

Desirable 

• Experience managing engineers and growing teams.
• Experience with classical search- or optimization-based motion planning, optimal control, MPC, or related motion-generation methods.
• Experience working in production release environments, ideally involving real hardware or multiple platforms
• Experience with automotive-grade software development processes or safety-related standards such as ISO26262 or SOTIF.
• Experience with Python and C++ in production autonomy or robotics systems.

This role is a full-time role based in Sunnyvale, CA (hybrid) and the reasonably estimated salary for this role ranges from $276,100 to $311,400, plus a competitive equity package. Actual compensation is based on the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience.

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.