Staff Applied Scientist, Foundation Models

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.  

At Wayve, 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!  

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.  Join our world-class team as we tackle today's most complex challenges and 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.   Make Wayve the experience that defines your career! 

About the Role

As a vital member of our research team, you'll harness your expertise to explore and expand the boundaries of AI in autonomous driving. This role will challenge you to leverage our vast datasets, architect advanced models, and invent novel learning paradigms to ensure the scalability and efficiency of our models.

In this role, you might:

• Pioneer the development of Foundation Models for robotics, enabling unprecedented generalization across diverse environments and embodiments.
• Innovate in multi-modal end-to-end learned models for a wide variety of tasks, including planning.  
• Employ and advance the state-of-the-art in imitation learning and reinforcement learning for dynamic decision-making in real-world scenarios.
• Explore Large Language and Large Multi-Modal Models and their integration into autonomous systems to improve interpretability, explainability and environmental understanding.
• Collaborate with cross-functional, international teams to integrate research findings into scalable, production-level solutions
• Contribute to academic publications for top-tier conferences like NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ICRA, ICLR, CoRL, COLM, etc. working in a world-class team, contributing to the scientific community and establishing Wayve as a leader in the field

You’d be a great match for this role if:

• You possess a passion for solving complex problems in AI and Robotics with a creative and analytical approach.
• You demonstrate leadership in scientific research, with a track record of impactful contributions to academia and/or industry.
• You enjoy collaborative innovation, working closely with a team of Applied Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, and Software Engineers to transform research into reality.

Essential:

• Masters, PhD or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Proven expertise in machine learning, with a focus on areas valuable to our team, such as reinforcement learning, foundation models, perception, large scale pretraining, large language models or large-scale multi-modal models.
• Demonstrated leadership in scientific efforts, with contributions to top-tier conferences and journals.
• Exceptional ability to work within and lead a cross-functional team, fostering an environment of collaboration and innovation.

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