Tech Lead, ML Engineer - AV Product engineering

The role 

As a Tech Lead, Machine Learning Engineer within Wayve’s AV Product Engineering team, you will lead the navigation workstream for our end-to-end autonomous driving system - spanning L2+, L3, and robotaxi products. This is a rare opportunity to own your work from model training all the way through to deployment in production vehicles, with full visibility into the entire pipeline. Joining a small, high-impact team, you will set the technical direction for navigation ML and have meaningful scope for growth as the team expands.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the navigation workstream, including route planning, rerouting, and driving across L2+, L3, and robotaxi products.
• Train and deploy end-to-end models for navigation and driving features, owning the full lifecycle from model training through to vehicle integration and production deployment.
• Define the roadmap and technical vision for navigation ML within the AV Features team, helping shape the direction of L2+ driving features.
• Collaborate closely with the Evaluation, Robot Software, and Data Platform teams to iterate rapidly and improve model performance.
• Leverage closed-loop and open-loop evaluation frameworks to measure driving quality and validate production readiness.
• Mentor and support junior engineers on the team and shape the long-term technical direction
  

About you  

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

Essential 

• 7+ years of ML engineering experience with a strong track record of shipping deep learning systems to production.
• Proficient in Python and other relevant languages (e.g. C++ and CUDA) and ML frameworks (esp. PyTorch), with a solid foundation in software engineering practices.
• Hands-on experience with transformer-based and multimodal architectures, including vision-language models (VLM), vision-language-action models (VLA), or equivalent.
• Demonstrated ability to train and deploy end-to-end ML models for production systems.
• Strong understanding of end-to-end learning approaches for driving, embodied AI, or related domains.
• Ability to take full ownership of a technical workstream - driving it from research and experimentation through to production deployment.

Desirable 

• Prior work in autonomous driving, imitation learning, or trajectory prediction. Or background in the AV industry, ideally from a perception, planning, controls, or evaluation team.
• Experience with closed-loop simulation and open-loop evaluation for autonomous driving or robotics systems.
• Familiarity with navigation problems, route planning, or multi-modal sensor fusion.
• Research publications in relevant areas (machine learning, robotics, computer vision) - less critical than strong applied production experience

This role is a full-time role based in Sunnyvale, CA (hybrid) and the reasonably estimated salary for this role ranges from $336,400 to $381,600, 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.