Staff Software Engineer - Model Development Platform

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 the role
As a Staff Software Engineer on the Model Development Platform, you'll own the architecture of the cloud services that power Wayve's AI model lifecycle, from data and training workflows to experiment scheduling, evaluation and on-road testing. You'll build the secure, reliable and scalable foundations (identity and access, microservices, micro-frontends, deployment and rollback) that let researchers and engineers iterate fast and ship autonomous driving models safely.

🧠 Your day-to-day
Working with the Head of Model Dev Platform and fellow technical leads, you'll shape the technical direction for your area and align platform engineering with company goals. You'll lead by example: staying hands-on across backend services, web applications and cloud infrastructure, and raising the bar through design reviews and mentorship.

🧩 What you’ll own

• Scalable, reliable cloud services: Design and evolve the architecture of major platform services for reliability, observability, security and scalability. Help set availability, latency and performance targets (SLAs/SLOs) and drive the practices to meet them.

• Authentication & authorization: Own the identity, access control and auditability layer across platform services and applications, so access to sensitive models and fleet data is secure, consistent and easy to adopt.

• Microservices & micro-frontends: Define the patterns, boundaries and shared tooling for backend microservices and micro-frontends, so teams can build and release independently while systems interoperate cleanly.

• Deployment & rollback infrastructure: Build robust CI/CD, progressive delivery and fast, safe rollback, with the observability, alerting and self-healing needed to ship often and recover quickly.

• End-to-end technical ownership: Take significant services and multi-quarter initiatives from problem definition and design through to production operation, making clear trade-offs between speed, scalability, security and operational simplicity.

• Cross-team technical leadership: Connect your area with adjacent disciplines, from experiment scheduling and data pipelines to distributed compute, and lead design reviews that establish reusable patterns.

• Hands-on problem solving: Tackle the hardest technical challenges in your subteams with pragmatic solutions that balance innovation and operational simplicity.

• Strategic collaboration: Partner with Product, Research, Design and Operations to align technical solutions with user needs and contribute to the platform's long-term roadmap.

🙌 You should apply if

• Technical leadership: 7+ years designing and building large-scale distributed systems, cloud platforms or developer platforms, including at senior or staff level.

• Cloud services & architecture: Proven ability to design and operate scalable microservice architectures on a major cloud provider, with strong grounding in API design, data modeling, asynchronous workflows and distributed-systems fundamentals.

• Security & access control: Hands-on experience implementing authentication and authorization (e.g. OAuth2/OIDC, RBAC) with sound security practices.

• Reliability & delivery: Experience driving reliability improvements, defining SLAs/SLOs, and building observable, self-healing, highly available systems. Experience with CI/CD, containerization and orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes), infrastructure as code, and safe release and rollback strategies.

• Hands-on engineering: Ability to write and review production-quality code in languages such as Python or TypeScript, with a good understanding of modern web architectures including React and micro-frontends.

• End-to-end ownership: A track record of taking significant services from design through deployment and production operation.

• Collaborative influence & mentorship: Excellent communication and cross-functional skills, with a track record of mentoring engineers through design discussions, code reviews and pairing, and of fostering a culture of engineering excellence.

Nice to have:

• Experience building internal developer platforms, workflow systems or tools for ML researchers and engineers.

• Familiarity with ML operations, such as training, evaluation, experiment tracking and artifact management.

• Experience with data pipelines, distributed job orchestration, event-driven architectures or large-scale compute (e.g. Spark, Ray, Airflow, MLflow).

• Experience with service mesh, API gateways, or feature-flagging and progressive-delivery tooling.

• Knowledge of privacy, compliance and secure handling of sensitive or large-scale data.

• Experience in autonomous systems, robotics, simulation or another safety-critical domain.🛠️ About our Engineering Teams
  The Model Development Platform team builds the infrastructure and tooling behind Wayve’s AI model lifecycle, from data ingestion and training to experiment scheduling and on-road testing. Our work spans AI research, large-scale distributed systems and robotic operations, and lets researchers and engineers iterate fast and deploy autonomous driving models safely.

🌱 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

• HM meeting

• Deep-dive technical interviews [programming, system design & domain-specific interviews; 4 hours total]

• 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.