Engineering Manager, Runtime Platform, Robot Software

Before the detail, here's the challenge you'd help us solve. We build the embodied intelligence that moves real vehicles safely, and the ecosystem a billion machines will run on in the future. Very few people in AI can say this. Every role here, whatever the team, plugs into that. Here’s what this particular role covers. ENGINEERING MANAGER, RUNTIME PLATFORM, ROBOT SOFTWARE London, UK or Sunnyvale, CA 🛠️ ABOUT OUR ENGINEERING TEAMS Wayve is building embodied AI that can drive any vehicle, anywhere. Our AI Driver operates onboard the vehicle in real time, supported by the application frameworks, middleware, performance capabilities and observability foundations owned by the Runtime Platform team. This growing function is becoming a dedicated team, and you’ll be the Engineering Manager responsible for leading it. Other onboard components depend on the frameworks, inter-process communication layers, monitoring and performance capabilities your team delivers. The team’s work is central to scaling Wayve’s AI Driver across new vehicles, OEM programes and other embodiments. 🧠 YOUR DAY-TO-DAY You’ll lead a single team and be accountable for its delivery, engagement, resourcing, roadmap and performance. People leadership will be your first priority: you’ll coach and develop engineers, maintain a healthy and high-performing team, and lead hiring and onboarding as the team grows. You’ll combine this with strong technical judgement, establishing direction across latency, profiling, real-time scheduling, middleware and observability. Working closely with technical leads and stakeholders, you’ll own the outcomes of the team’s technical decisions and ensure its roadmap supports Wayve’s broader goals. You’ll also act as the team’s escalation point, proactively identifying and resolving risks, dependencies and delivery challenges. 🧩 WHAT YOU’LL BE WORKING ON - Leading and developing the team: Run effective one-to-ones, set clear expectations, provide regular high-quality feedback, manage performance and support career development against Wayve’s career framework - Hiring and building the team: Own hiring and onboarding, ensure the right people are in the right roles, and shape the team’s culture and ways of working - Driving execution: Staff committed programmes, align the roadmap with available resources, prioritise effectively and hold the team accountable for delivery, quality and operational reliability - Setting technical direction: Establish a clear, holistic direction and ownership of technology-roadmap milestones in partnership with technical leads and stakeholders - Owning runtime foundations: Guide the team’s work across system design, application frameworks, middleware and IPC, performance optimisation, measurement and observability - Enabling new vehicle platforms: Support additional vehicle platforms through incremental development while minimizing performance degradation - Strengthening quality and iteration: Implement and maintain strong continuous integration, hardware-in-the-loop testing and internal quality gates - Collaborating across Wayve: Partner with Vehicle Software, model development, hardware and OEM programe teams - Unblocking delivery: Cascade the roadmap, surface risks and dependencies early, and act as the team’s point of escalation 🙌 YOU SHOULD APPLY IF - You have a strong track record of leading, growing, engaging and retaining a high-performing software or systems team - You have experience hiring, coaching, providing feedback, managing performance and supporting engineers’ career development - You have owned a team roadmap and delivered through others, including planning, prioritisation, resourcing and accountability for quality and operational reliability - You have hands-on experience architecting and delivering embedded software shipped in a physical product to real customers - You understand high-performance, low-latency embedded software developed in C++ and can earn the trust of senior systems engineers without needing to be the team’s top individual contributor - You understand profiling, benchmarking, latency, throughput, memory-bandwidth analysis and real-time scheduling on embedded Linux - You have a strong understanding of middleware used in high-throughput, real-time or robotics systems, including the trade-offs across vendors and platforms - You can establish direction and deliver through influence across multiple stakeholder teams The following experience would be useful but is not required: - Automotive, robotics or another safety-relevant, real-time domain - QNX, a microkernel architecture or another real-time operating system - Profiling tools such as pprof/gperftools, perf, Nsight or NVLumo - Observability platforms such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana or Datadog - NVIDIA Orin or Thor compute platforms - Qualcomm compute platforms 🌱 Not ticking every box? That’s totally okay. If you’re passionate about autonomy and keen to learn, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement. MORE ABOUT WAYVE 🚀 Wayve is building the leading AI platform for autonomous driving. We are pioneering an end-to-end AI approach that enables vehicles to learn directly from real-world experience, developing the ability to adapt, generalize and improve at scale. Instead of relying on hand-coded rules or pre-mapped environments, our AI Driver learns to drive by understanding the world around it. The result is technology that navigates complex urban environments with intelligence, precision and natural flow, unlocking meaningful advances in both safety and efficiency. We believe autonomy represents a once-in-a-generation transformation in how people and goods move, comparable to the shift from horses to cars and from human-driven vehicles to intelligent machines. Our ambition is to make autonomy universal. Wayve’s mapless and hardware-agnostic AI platform integrates with global OEM partners, enabling continuous software evolution and unlocking advanced levels of automation from L2+ through to L4 as our core AI model scales. In a race increasingly defined by intelligence and real-world learning, Wayve is taking a distinct approach: building generalisable driving intelligence that can power any vehicle, anywhere. By combining embodied AI with scalable deployment, we are creating technology that can be shaped to each OEM brand and driver experience, accelerating the transition to a safer and more intelligent future of mobility. 💻 HOW WE WORK—LOCATION AND FLEXIBLE WORKING This is a full-time role based in our London office. Our main hubs are in London, Sunnyvale, Yokohama, Herzliya, Vancouver and Leonberg. We operate a hybrid working model that combines in-person collaboration in our dedicated offices and workshops with focused time working remotely. We also operate core working hours, allowing you to determine the schedule that works best for you and your team. This gives our teams the connection and energy of working together alongside the flexibility to do their best work. 🔍 THE INTERVIEW PROCESS Our process is clear and respectful of your time: - Initial recruiter conversation - Competency interviews — Leadership & Management and Runtime Platform Domain interviews; approximately two hours in total - Deep-dive interviews — Hiring Manager, Software Systems Design and Code Review interviews; approximately three hours in total - Final interview — mission and values alignment; approximately one hour We’ll explain each format in advance and work around your availability. Wayve is committed to creating an inclusive interview experience. If you require any accommodations or adjustments to participate fully in the process, please let us know. WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU? Benefits vary by location. 💰 Salaries benchmarked against the market annually 📈 Meaningful equity, sharing in the ownership and long-term success of Wayve ✈️ Relocation support and visa sponsorship where applicable ✅ Hybrid working, core hours and opportunities to work hands-on in vehicle workshops and labs 📚 Learning and development budgets, with support for training, conferences and professional growth 🩺 Comprehensive benefits, including health insurance, dental coverage, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, retirement or pension support where applicable, access to therapists, wellbeing partnerships, team socials and more   A quick, honest note before you apply. Wayve is not a mature, fully-structured place with the playbook already written. Much of how we work is still being written, and if you join, you’ll help write it. That suits people who want real ownership more than people who need a settled structure from day one. If that sounds like the kind of problem you want to spend your time on, we’d really like to hear from you. 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. For more information visit Careers at Wayve. https://wayve.ai/careers/ To learn more about what drives us, visit Values at Wayve https://wayve.ai/careers/ 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.