Research Manager, Gen AI

Our team is the first in the world to use autonomous vehicles on public roads using end-to-end deep learning. With our multi-national world-class technical team, we’re building things differently.

We don’t think it’s scalable to tell an algorithm how to drive through hand-coded rules and expensive HD maps. Instead, we believe that using experience and data will allow our algorithms to be more intelligent: capable of easily adapting to new environments. Our aim is to be the future of self-driving cars: the first to deploy in 100 cities across the world bringing autonomy to everyone, everywhere.

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 Mountain View office, you will be responsible for managing & scaling a strong Science team which is building our Wayve Foundational Model in collaboration with other Wayve science teams in London and Vancouver. 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.

What you’ll 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

Our offer:

• Competitive compensation, on-site chef and bar, lots of fun socials, workplace nursery scheme, comprehensive private health insurance and more!
• Immersion in a team of world-class researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs.
• A position to shape the future of autonomous driving, and thus bring about a real world deployment of a breakthrough technology.
• Help relocating/travelling to London, with visa sponsorship.
• Flexible working hours – we trust you to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.

Wayve is built by people from all walks of life. We believe that it is our differences that make us stronger, and our unique perspectives and backgrounds that allow us to build something different. We are proud to be an equal opportunities workplace, where we don’t just embrace diversity but nurture it – so that we all thrive and grow.