Engineering Manager, Semantic Understanding

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 the Engineering Manager of Semantic Understanding, you will lead a development team focused on extracting rules from the environment that influence driving behaviour. Initially, these will feed into ADAS functions such as lane assist, traffic sign detection, and ODD classification, as part of our ADAS One-Stop Shop product. Our AV2.0 approach to ADAS outperforms the current systems available in the market, enabled by large volumes of data, edge filtering, and validation at scale.

We are looking for a system-oriented leader with cross-functional experience to bridge this world of conventionally perception-based features to end-to-end learning.

Key responsibilities:

• Help define and drive the Semantic Understanding roadmap, lead technical discussions and guide direction where needed.
• Build a resilient team which prioritises effectively, anticipates the needs of the business, and maintains a culture of impact.
• Understand Wayve’s end-to-end approach and how it maps to AV 1.0, drawing parallels in our development story and highlighting key advantages. This may include external engagements where necessary.
• Dive into data analytics, constructing evaluation suites, and get in-vehicle experiences from time to time to ground your understanding of the system.
• Drive cross-functional initiatives through effective communication, working through organisational boundaries when necessary to deliver on company goals and priorities.

About you  

In order to set you up for success as an Engineering Manager at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.

Essential 

• Proven track record of managing engineering teams.
• Solid understanding of machine learning fundamentals.
• Experience with roadmap planning, stakeholder management, requirements gathering and alignment with peers towards milestones and deliverables.
• Track record of promoting software engineering best practices and excellence within the team.
• Demonstrated ability to manage software engineers and grow their careers.
• Good foundational coding knowledge and experience.

Desirable 

• Experience developing ML systems.
• Experience with perception systems, trained and deployed at scale.
• Experience with offline autolabelling.
• Experience with performance evaluation of embodied AI systems.
• Development experience in Python.
• Experience developing ADAS functions.

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