Head of AI – Research Manager

Established in 2017, Wayve is a leader in autonomous vehicle technology, driven by breakthroughs in Embodied AI. Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic technologies empower vehicles to navigate complex environments effortlessly.

Supported by prominent investors, Wayve is advancing the transition from assisted to fully automated driving, making transportation safer, more efficient, and universally accessible. Join our world-class, multinational team of engineers and researchers as we push the boundaries of frontier AI and autonomous driving, creating impactful technologies and products on a global scale

Where you will have an impact:

Science is the team that is advancing our end-to-end autonomous driving research. The team’s mission is to accelerate our journey to AV2.0 and ensure the future success of Wayve by incubating and investing in new ideas that have the potential to become game-changing technological advances for the company.

As the first Research Manager in our Vancouver office, you will be responsible for managing & scaling a strong Science team in collaboration with other Wayve science teams in London and Mountain View. You will provide coaching and guidance to each of the researchers and engineers within your team and work with leaders across the company to ensure sustainable career growth for your team during a period of growth in the company. You will participate in our project-based operating model where your focus will be unlocking the potential of your team and its technical leaders to drive industry-leading impact. As part of your work, you will help identify the right projects to invest in, ensure the right allocation of resources to those projects, keep the team in good health, provide technical feedback to your team, share progress to build momentum, and build alignment and strong collaboration across the wider Science organisation. We are actively hiring and aim to substantially grow our research team over the next two years and you will be at the heart of this.

Challenges you will own:

• Work closely with team members to develop career plans and growth trajectories based on each individual’s strengths and weaknesses and their own aspirations.
• Work closely with project leads to ensure team members are having strong impact and are set up for success.
• Work closely with project leads and Science leadership to ensure projects are resourced in a way that balances the needs of the business with the needs of the individuals.
• Offer coaching and technical mentorship to direct reports (especially project leads).
• Bring technical & project management expertise and experience to help accelerate our progress and decision-making.
• Challenge the status quo (both technical and organisational/process).
• Prioritize effectively and keep processes lean and effective.
• Partner with leadership to maintain a culture of cross-boundary collaboration, impact, innovation, and health.
• Grow the team as a hiring manager, to bring in complementary, diverse skill sets and backgrounds. Anticipate the needs of the business 6-24 months out, identify areas where additional resources are needed or we need to grow new domain expertise, and pitch this to leadership for investment.
• Contribute to the day-to-day running of the Science team’s operations and larger collaborative efforts.

Day-to-Day:

• 1:1s across the team reporting updates or coaching through career hurdles
• Ensure project leads within your team are aligning projects with company goals and priorities
• Encourage bold ambition and risk-taking in projects
• Work cross-functionally with company leaders to set the broader strategy and roadmap
• Sit down with researchers and engineers to review upcoming decisions and assess any dependencies or risks
• Organise reading groups and other scientific learning activities
• Debug teams and projects – ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, think creatively, eliminate possible factors that could be contributing to a bug, add feedback loops, and then assess feedback
• Work with leadership to communicate progress, blockers, and potential accelerants
• Assess general team health and look for opportunities to improve processes and best practices
• Ensure strong research engineering practice across the team that balances scientific agility with strong engineering
• Contribute to outreach efforts at the office, conferences, etc.

What you will bring to Wayve:

Essential:

• Prior experience as a manager of research teams (10-15+ people) with a clear career interest towards management
• Passionate about fostering personal and professional growth in individual team members
• Experience with roadmap planning, stakeholder management, requirements gathering and alignment with peers towards milestones and deliverables
• Strong knowledge of Machine Learning and related areas, such as Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, etc.
• Industry experience with machine learning technology development which has had real-world product impact
• Experience driving a team and technical project through the full lifecycle, ideally within the language, vision or multimodal space
• Passionate about bringing research concepts through to product
• Research and engineering fundamentals
• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or similar experience

Desirable:

• Experience managing the execution of a technical product
• Good experience working in a project-based (“matrix”) operating environment
• Proven track record of successfully delivering research projects and publications
• Experience working with robotics, self-driving, AR/VR, or LLMs

This is our ideal candidate, but by no means the only candidate; we all have different strengths. If you don’t match 100% but believe you could do the job well, we would love to hear from you.

What we offer you:

• Competitive compensation, learning & development, daily lunches, lots of fun socials, comprehensive private health insurance and more!
• Immersion in a team of world-class researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs.
• A position to shape the future of embodied AI, and thus bring about a real-world deployment of a breakthrough technology.
• Help relocating to Vancouver, with visa sponsorship.
• Flexible working hours – we trust you to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.

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 gender, gender identity, gender expression, race, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, ethnicity, age, religious belief, marital status, protected veteran status , or any other legally protected status.

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