Lead Technical Program Manager - Data

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 Program Management Team

Wayve’s Program Management team turns complex technical goals into coordinated delivery. Working closely with engineering, research and product teams, we align priorities, manage dependencies and bring clarity to ambiguous challenges. We combine technical depth with cross-functional leadership to help teams move faster, more effectively and with purpose—focusing on meaningful outcomes rather than process for its own sake.

As part of this team, you’ll build and lead the technical programme management function supporting our Data organisation. You’ll partner with Data and Engineering leadership to make valuable data immediately and reliably usable, combining hands-on ownership of flagship programmes with coaching and developing a small, high-impact TPM team.

🧠 Your day-to-day

• Coach and support a small, high-impact TPM team, helping people develop their skills, work through challenges and raise the standard of programme delivery.

• Act as a trusted delivery partner to Data and Engineering leadership, aligning priorities, challenging trade-offs and holding teams and leaders accountable for meaningful outcomes.

• Work across data, ML, engineering and external data and annotation suppliers to manage dependencies, surface risks and remove blockers.

• Use KPIs, dashboards and operational reviews to understand delivery progress, identify bottlenecks and steer decisions with the right data.

• Represent the Data organisation in company-level reviews, communicating progress, risks and decisions clearly and connecting delivery to business impact.

🧩 What you’ll be working on:

• Building and scaling the technical programme management function for our Data organisation, hiring to fill capability gaps and growing a high-performing team.

• Owning planning, prioritisation and execution across the data roadmap in partnership with Data leadership.

• Leading flagship programmes directly across the data platform, ingestion and standardisation pipelines, enrichment and curation, labelling and annotation, and dataset management and quality.

• Establishing scalable planning cadences, governance, escalation paths and operational practices that bring structure without slowing delivery.

• Driving measurable improvements in data quality, throughput, cost and time-to-insight, making the data that powers our models more reliably and predictably available.

🙌 You should apply if:

• You bring 8+ years of deep, hands-on experience delivering data programmes as a technical programme manager, spanning data platforms, pipelines, enrichment, curation or labelling. You’ve built or scaled a programme function, led people and processes, and get things done with ownership and a bias for action.

• You build, coach and grow high-performing teams. You know how to develop people, hire to strengthen the team and raise the bar on technical programme management.

• You have strong technical depth across data platforms, pipelines and large-scale distributed infrastructure, including platforms operating at petabyte scale. You can engage credibly with engineers without being expected to write production code. Your experience includes:

  • Data ingestion from raw data through multiple processing stages and pipelines, with an understanding of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), their uses and their challenges.

  • A solid understanding of machine learning, GPUs, and training and inference for models with 500 million to 20 billion parameters.

  • Proficiency with some or all of Databricks, Flyte, Ray, Kubernetes, Azure, Docker and Python.

  • Proficiency with AI agents such as Cursor, Claude or Codex to accelerate execution.

• You stay objective under pressure and adapt your approach in ambiguous, fast-moving environments. You bring structure and clarity without creating unnecessary process or slowing delivery.

• You think in systems, understanding how the parts of a complex data platform fit together and how changes in one area affect others.

• You’re product-minded, focusing on the people your programmes serve, prioritising by impact and defining what good looks like—not just tracking activity.

• You align and influence across data, ML and engineering without relying on formal authority.

• You connect data investment to measurable outcomes, including quality, throughput and cost, and communicate direction and progress clearly using the right metrics.

• You’re open to feedback and continuously improve how you and your team work.

• Ideally, you’ve worked with large-scale distributed data platforms used by hundreds of engineers and researchers.

• Experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics or other large-scale data and ML programmes would also be valuable.

• An engineering or computer science degree, or experience working as an engineer, alongside fluency with modern delivery tools such as Jira, would be a plus.

🌱 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 (30 minutes)

• Competency Interviews (TPM process, Cross-functional; 1 hour 45 minutes total)

• Deep-dive technical interviews (Program Design, Leadership & Management; 1 hour 45 minutes total)

• Final interview: mission & values alignment (30 minutes).

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
✅ 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.