Staff Tech Lead Manager, Machine Learning, Vision Models

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 a Staff Tech Lead Manager on Wayve's Measurement team in AI Evaluation, based in our London office, you will lead a team building and productionising offline scene understanding models. You will directly manage four Senior Machine Learning Engineers and own the technical direction for turning technology from our on-vehicle models and Wayve Foundation Models into the robust, scalable scene understanding models that power our validation machine. You should be motivated by measurement and evaluation as a first-class engineering discipline.

Your team's mission is to predict and explain counterfactual outcomes, answering the question "what would have happened if we'd used a different driving model?", and to build the models that let Wayve understand coverage, mine rare events, and assess the behaviour of our end-to-end AV2.0 driver after on-road runs and in simulation. The offline environment gives the team headroom the vehicle never has: more compute per frame, larger models, and access to both past and future temporal context. The outputs are mission-critical, directly informing model development decisions and customer deliverables. This work currently spans several teams and sites, and you will pull it together into one coherent technical direction, working closely with on-vehicle modelling in AV Core, foundation model teams, Evaluation, simulation, and Model Development Platform across the UK and US.

Key responsibilities

• Lead and grow the team - directly manage four Senior MLEs in London; hire complementary talent across MLE, SWE, and data science profiles as scope grows; develop strong senior ICs and hold a high bar.
• Own the technical direction - guide the architecture for adapting shared on-vehicle models and Wayve Foundation Models for offline measurement use, exploiting the advantages of the offline environment: higher compute budgets, larger model capacity, and access to past and future temporal context.
• Own the roadmap - drive planning at sprint, quarterly, and annual cadences; translate ambiguous business goals into concrete technical programmes; be equally comfortable setting multi-year direction and getting into the weeds of a sprint review.
• Drive production quality - build rigorous engineering practice for ML systems relied on for customer-facing deliverables; champion rig-agnostic, generalisable architectures with clean interfaces; hold the line on architectural quality in a fast-moving environment.
• Accelerate the development loop - ensure your team's models reduce the time between a driving-model iteration and reliable, actionable feedback; make the whole AV development loop faster.
• Partner and anticipate - align roadmaps with on-vehicle modelling and Evaluation teams across the UK and US; resolve technical conflicts at the right level; identify capability gaps 6-24 months out and build the case for investment to close them.

About you

In order to set you up for success as a Staff Tech Lead Manager at Wayve, we're looking for the following skills and experience.

Essential

• 8+ years in ML engineering, including hands-on computer vision with camera and/or lidar sensor data, and a track record of shipping production ML systems from research through to reliable, monitored, customer-facing software.
• 2+ years line-managing or tech-leading senior engineers, including hiring, developing, and retaining strong ICs, with the appetite to keep doing both halves of the TLM role.
• Staff-level technical depth that earns the trust of senior MLEs: transformer-based and multimodal architectures, foundation models, and large-scale training, with the ability to review designs and code credibly.
• Proficient in Python and ML frameworks (esp. PyTorch), with strong judgement about what production-grade looks like for ML systems.
• Strong cross-functional leadership: aligning roadmaps across teams and geographies, and communicating technical context and strategic direction clearly to engineers and senior leadership.

Desirable

• Knowledge of perception systems and 3D scene understanding for autonomy, such as cuboid detection, lane estimation, depth estimation, and large-scale semantic enrichment of driving scenes.
• Experience with offboard or offline models: auto-labelling, model distillation, temporal or world models, or other ways of exploiting compute that on-vehicle systems cannot.
• Familiarity with simulation or counterfactual evaluation methods for autonomous systems.
• Experience leading or partnering with distributed teams across UK and US time zones.
• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

This is a full-time role based in our office in London. 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.

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.