Data Engineer - Application 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.

🛠️ About our Data Engineering and Machine Learning Team

We’re seeking an exceptional Data Engineer to join our Germany-based team within the Application Engineering org, focused on localising and advancing Wayve’s autonomous driving technology for the German market. This is a unique opportunity to play a hands-on role in shaping our AV capabilities in Germany from the ground up.

🧠 Your day-to-day

• Build and improve scalable data pipelines that support model development, evaluation, and production ML workflows for autonomous driving.

• Ingest, transform, and curate large-scale real-world, synthetic, and partner-provided datasets into structured, reliable, and model-ready formats aligned with standardized taxonomies and coordinate systems.

• Develop data quality checks, validation processes, and monitoring to ensure both raw data from our vehicle platforms and processed datasets are high-quality, complete, consistent, traceable, and fit for ML use cases.

• Curate and mine real-world and synthetic data to drive scenario diversity, coverage, and feature-specific development.

• Improve pipeline performance, reliability, and usability, helping reduce bottlenecks and increase iteration velocity across ML development.

• Collaborate closely with Machine Learning engineers, Data Corpus, AI Platform, and external partners to ensure data pipelines integrate effectively with production-scale learning systems.

🧩 What you’ll be working on

As a Data Engineer within the Machine Learning team in Application Software, you’ll contribute to critical initiatives that push the frontier of model-based autonomous driving—both in terms of core driving performance and feature-level intelligence such as personalization, comfort, and collaboration.

You’ll design and deliver scalable data pipelines that transform vast amounts of data from diverse internal and external sources into structured, reliable, and model-ready datasets. Your work will span data ingestion, data quality assurance, transformation, curation, evaluation and ML support. You’ll collaborate deeply with Wayve’s Data Corpus teams and ML engineers to build systems that are performant, adaptable, and ready for production.

🙌 You should apply if

Essential skills

• Proven experience building and operating scalable data pipelines or distributed data processing systems in production environments.

• Strong software engineering skills in Python, with a solid foundation in maintainable, reliable, and well-tested software development practices.

• Proficient in SQL and PySpark, with experience using warehouse/OLAP concepts, window functions, and Spark for distributed data processing.

• Experience with modern data pipeline architectures, including workflow orchestration and DAG-based systems such as Airflow, Flyte, Ray, or similar.

• Solid understanding of robotics and automated driving data concepts, including sensor characteristics, timestamping and clock synchronisation, coordinate transformations, calibration, and ego-motion signals such as GNSS/IMU and vehicle odometry.

• Understanding of machine learning development workflows, including training data generation, evaluation datasets, scenario mining, and model iteration.

• Excellent communication and collaborative skills, capable of working effectively with interdisciplinary teams.

Desirable skills

• Prior work in calibration, perception, imitation learning, or trajectory prediction.

• Experience with third-party dataset ingestion and transformation.

• Familiarity with automated driving data and scenario taxonomies, including ODD definitions, maneuver and behavior labels, scene classification, event tagging, semantic understanding.

🌱 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, generalise 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 plus 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 a 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, more intelligent future of mobility.

How we work 💻- Locations & Flexible Working:

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 office spaces with focused time working remotely. This gives our teams the connection and energy of working together, alongside the flexibility to do their best work in a way that fits their lives.

🔍 The Interview Process:

Our process is clear and respectful of your time:

• Initial Call / Recruiter Screen: general background, current situation, interests and Wayve company information & hiring context.

• Competency Interview: system design and data engineering skills.

• Deep-dive technical interviews: programming and domain knowledge.

• Final interview: mission & values alignment.

We’ll always explain the format and work around your availability.

What’s in it for you (Location dependant):

💰 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 the chance to work hands on in vehicle workshops and labs
📚 Learning and development budgets with support for training, conferences and growth
🩺 Comprehensive benefits including health insurance, dental, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, retirement or pension 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. To learn more about what drives us, visit Values at Wayve

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.