Location
London office, with hybrid working model combining in-person collaboration and remote work

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Negotiable

About the Role
Wayve is building embodied AI that can drive any vehicle, anywhere. The Runtime Platform team owns the application frameworks, middleware, performance capabilities and observability foundations that support the AI Driver operating onboard vehicles in real time. This team is growing into a dedicated function, and you will be the Engineering Manager responsible for leading it. Your leadership will be central to scaling Wayve’s AI Driver across new vehicles, OEM programmes and other embodiments.

In this role, you will lead a single team, accountable for its delivery, engagement, resourcing, roadmap and performance. People leadership is your priority: coaching and developing engineers, maintaining a healthy and high-performing team, and leading hiring and onboarding as the team grows. You will combine this with strong technical judgement, setting direction across latency, profiling, real-time scheduling, middleware and observability.

Working closely with technical leads and stakeholders, you will own the outcomes of the team’s technical decisions and ensure the roadmap supports Wayve’s broader goals. You will act as the team’s escalation point, proactively identifying and resolving risks, dependencies and delivery challenges.

Your responsibilities include:
- Leading and developing the team through effective one-to-ones, clear expectations, regular feedback, performance management and career development
- Hiring and building the team, ensuring the right people are in the right roles and shaping team culture and ways of working
- Driving execution by staffing committed programmes, aligning the roadmap with resources, prioritising effectively and holding the team accountable for delivery, quality and operational reliability
- Setting technical direction and ownership of technology-roadmap milestones in partnership with technical leads and stakeholders
- Owning runtime foundations including system design, application frameworks, middleware and IPC, performance optimisation, measurement and observability
- Supporting new vehicle platforms through incremental development while minimising performance degradation
- Strengthening quality and iteration by implementing continuous integration, hardware-in-the-loop testing and internal quality gates
- Collaborating across Wayve with Vehicle Software, model development, hardware and OEM programme teams
- Unblocking delivery by cascading the roadmap, surfacing risks and dependencies early, and acting as the team’s escalation point

Wayve is pioneering an end-to-end AI approach for autonomous driving that enables vehicles to learn directly from real-world experience. Our AI Driver navigates complex urban environments with intelligence, precision and natural flow, unlocking advances in safety and efficiency. We operate a hybrid working model with core hours, providing flexibility and collaboration opportunities.

The interview process is clear and respectful, including recruiter conversation, competency interviews, deep-dive interviews and a final mission and values alignment interview. Wayve is committed to an inclusive interview experience and will accommodate any required adjustments.

Benefits vary by location and include competitive salaries benchmarked annually, meaningful equity, relocation support and visa sponsorship where applicable, hybrid working, learning and development budgets, comprehensive health and wellbeing benefits, and more.

Wayve is a dynamic and evolving company where you will have real ownership and the opportunity to help shape how we work. We are committed to creating a diverse, fair and respectful culture inclusive of all individuals regardless of background or identity.

Experience
- Proven track record of leading, growing, engaging and retaining a high-performing software or systems team
- Experience hiring, coaching, providing feedback, managing performance and supporting engineers’ career development
- Ownership of team roadmap and delivery through others, including planning, prioritisation, resourcing and accountability for quality and operational reliability
- Hands-on experience architecting and delivering embedded software shipped in physical products to real customers
- Strong understanding of high-performance, low-latency embedded software developed in C++
- Expertise in profiling, benchmarking, latency, throughput, memory-bandwidth analysis and real-time scheduling on embedded Linux
- Knowledge of middleware used in high-throughput, real-time or robotics systems, including trade-offs across vendors and platforms
- Ability to establish direction and deliver through influence across multiple stakeholder teams

About you
- Strong people leadership skills with a focus on coaching and team development
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills to work across diverse teams
- Proactive problem solver who can identify and resolve risks and dependencies early
- Passionate about autonomy and keen to learn and grow in a fast-evolving environment
- Comfortable working in a dynamic, evolving company where processes and structures are still being developed

Qualifications
The following experience is useful but not required:
- Automotive, robotics or another safety-relevant, real-time domain
- Experience with QNX, microkernel architectures or other real-time operating systems
- Familiarity with profiling tools such as pprof/gperftools, perf, Nsight or NVLumo
- Knowledge of observability platforms such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana or Datadog
- Experience with NVIDIA Orin, Thor or Qualcomm compute platforms