Engineering Director – Evaluation and Validation

Who are we?
Our team is the first in the world to use autonomous vehicles on public roads using end-to-end deep learning. With our multi-national world-class technical team, we’re building things differently. We don’t think it’s scalable to tell an algorithm how to drive through hand-coded rules and expensive HD maps. Instead, we believe that using experience and data will allow our algorithms to be more intelligent: capable of easily adapting to new environments. Our aim is to be the future of self-driving cars: the first to deploy in 100 cities across the world bringing autonomy to everyone, everywhere.
The impact you will have
Wayve is developing next-generation autonomous driving technology, to enable autonomous transportation services. As Director of Engineering you will manage the Evaluation and Validation group within our Software Engineering organisation. You will report to the VP of Software who reports to the CEO. There are four R&D groups in the Software department:
Cloud Infrastructure (data and ML training infra)
Onboard Software (the car computer system software)
Embodied AI Products (the AI+Robotics autonomy software and data)
Evaluation and Validation (make our AI easy to measure and then prove it is safe)
The Evaluation and Validation group is on the critical path to company success. Your mission is (1) to enable Wayve to iterate quickly towards solving Autonomy problems and (2) to make our AI products trusted by our commercial partners and end users. You will be responsible for defining and building a development and validation toolkit and process for our Embodied AI technology.
Today that includes Simulation (digitise the self-driving problem in order to enable the creation of new training and validation datasets), Experiments (essentially the Embodied AI development toolkit), Data Science (measurement reliability and accuracy in noisy self-driving environments). You will need to develop additional capabilities to evaluate model performance and validate its safety across a large corpus of recorded and synthesised scenarios.
You will need to grow the team from about 25 to 50 engineers the first 12 months with potential for significant growth thereafter. You are expected to establish solid software and ML practices from the start and to attract technical leadership.
You will set the technical direction in your area and ensure that deliverables align with company objectives. You will provide leadership and guidance to the Engineering Managers within your area. You will steer the teams and coordinate with others across Wayve. You will partner with our Science department to stay on top of the latest advances and bring those quickly to production. You will work with leaders across the company to ensure career growth for your teams.
This means you will:
Define and own the technical vision, strategy and metrics for your area, ensuring its teams and the rest of Wayve are aligned and galvanised.
Digitise the self-driving problem. Greatly improve our ability to predict and compare on-road performance through off-road simulation.
Build efficient off-road open-loop and closed-loop tools for safety validation.
Partner with the senior leadership team to maintain a culture of impact, performance, and health.
Build technical capabilities across the division and develop talented engineers as Wayve grows.
Build resilient and reliable systems, teams and individuals.
Work closely with team members to develop career plans and growth trajectories based on each individual’s strengths and weaknesses and their own aspirations.
What you’ll bring to Wayve
Essential Management: 2+ years of leading teams of 50+ engineers at large companies or 25+ at startups.
Execution skills: resource allocation, program planning and execution.
Domain skills: neural net understanding/introspection and/or validation.
Domain skills: simulation of embodied/physical systems.
Engineering skills: code development practices, testing, serviceability.
Product delivery skills: roadmap articulation, interface with leadership & business functions.
Education: BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or similar experience.
Desirable Industry experience in Robotics, particularly related to simulating robots.
Industry experience with Computer Vision with real-world product impact.
Experience with cloud platforms, databases, large scale data pipelines.
This is our ideal candidate, but by no means the only candidate; we all have different strengths. If you don’t match 100% but believe you could do the job well, we would love to hear from you.
Our offer
Competitive compensation and significant upside potential as a well funded series B startup.
Immersion in a team of world-class researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs.
Opportunity to shape the future of autonomous driving, a real world breakthrough technology.
On-site chef and bar in London, fun socials, workplace nursery scheme, comprehensive private health insurance.
Help relocating to London or Mountain View, CA, with visa sponsorship.
Flexible working hours - we trust you to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.
Wayve is built by people from all walks of life. We believe that it is our differences that make us stronger, and our unique perspectives and backgrounds that allow us to build something different. We are proud to be an equal opportunities workplace, where we don’t just embrace diversity but nurture it - so that we all thrive and grow.
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