Engineering Manager, OS, 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.

The role

As Engineering Manager for OS, you'll lead a single team and be accountable for its delivery, engagement, resourcing, roadmap, and performance. People leadership is your first priority: you'll coach and grow the team, keep it engaged and high-performing, and own hiring as the team stands up. You'll pair that with strong technical judgment — setting clear technical direction and owning the outcome of the team's technical decisions. You will lead the planning for the team - setting the direction for the team and identifying the highest impact work for the business.

What you'll do

• Lead and grow the team (first priority): keep the team engaged, developing, and performing with good morale; run 1:1s, set clear expectations, give regular high-quality feedback, manage performance, and support career growth against our career framework.
• Hire and build the team: own hiring and onboarding to get the right people in the right roles, and shape the team's culture and ways of working as it forms.
• Drive execution: ensure the team's work advances company goals; staff committed programs, keep the roadmap aligned to available resources, prioritize, and hold the team accountable for delivery, quality, and operational reliability.
• Set technical direction: ensure the team has a clear, holistic technical direction and clear ownership of its technology-roadmap milestones — working closely with the team's tech lead(s) and stakeholders; own the outcome of the team's technical decisions.
• Own the OS foundations: guide the team's work across system design, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement. Evaluate and drive the roadmap of the operating system at Wayve. Unlock new hardware platform enablement with incremental work and minimal performance degradation. Implement and maintain strong CI, HIL, and internal quality gates to provide a robust framework for fast iteration.
• Bring up new hardware platforms: collaborate with our Hardware partners on new board bring-ups and scale with quality. Optimize build, package, and deployment systems for broad capability and high heterogeneity. Set quality metrics and targets to gate deployment from 1 to 10,000 units and follow through with fully automated testing and release gates.
• Collaborate and unblock: cascade the roadmap, partner with internal Vehicle Software teams, model developers, hardware, and OEM programs. Act as the point of escalation for your team, and proactively surface and resolve risks and dependencies.

What you'll bring

• Engineering management experience (essential): a track record of leading, growing, engaging, and retaining a high-performing software/systems team — including hiring, coaching, feedback, and performance management. People management is your first priority.
• Delivery through a team: experience owning a team's roadmap and shipping through others — planning, prioritization, resourcing, and accountability for quality and operational reliability.
• Technical credibility: hands-on depth in what takes to architect and deliver embedded software shipped on a product to real customers. Demonstrate knowledge of high-performance, low-latency embedded software (C & C++ preferred) to earn the trust of senior engineers and own the team's technical decisions. You don't need to be the team's top individual contributor.
• OS fundamentals: solid understanding of the linux kernel, device trees, board support packages, build & packaging systems for embedded devices, software update and OTA, QNX fundamentals, security and robust testing in SIL and HIL
• Peripheral drivers: broad experience authoring highly performant and reliable periperhal drivers with experience across both low & high (e.g. PCIe) speed devices. Bonus points for experience with software/hardware architectures that implement high reliability fault tolerance.
• Leadership:
• Cross functional: the ability to set direction and deliver through influence across many stakeholder teams.
• Diversity: experience managing direct reports in different time zones and leading projects involving external partners and vendors

Nice to have

• Experience with NVIDIA DriveOS
• Experience with a micro-kernel and/or real-time OS (e.g. QNX) is a plus.
• Experience with NVIDIA Jetson and/or Drive platforms, Qualcomm, AMD, or Renesas compute platforms.

Why this team

The OS team supports Wayve's on-vehicle stack — other on-board components rely on the foundations, frameworks, observability, and layers it owns. You'll lead a team whose work contributes to how Wayve scales its AI Driver to new vehicles, OEM programs, and other embodiments.

This role is a full-time role based in Sunnyvale, CA (hybrid) and the reasonably estimated salary for this role ranges from $276,100 to $311,400, plus a competitive equity package. Actual compensation is based on the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience.

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.