Lead Technical Program Manager, Quality & Compliance
Wayve · London, England
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.
THE ROLE
As the Lead Technical Program Manager for Quality & Compliance at Wayve, you'll build and lead the technical program management function that rolls out company-wide quality and compliance initiatives - spanning quality (including ASPICE), security, data privacy, and operational safety. This role reaches across the whole of Wayve: you'll turn complex, often heavyweight requirements into pragmatic, low-overhead processes that raise the bar without slowing the company down.
You'll lead flagship initiatives yourself while supporting and coaching a small, high-impact TPM team. Your impact is measured in how effectively Wayve meets its quality and compliance obligations - and how lightly those obligations sit on the organisation. A successful TPM leader is a force multiplier - helping teams move faster, more effectively, and with purpose.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Lead the function: Build, coach, and grow a small TPM team; hire to fill gaps and raise the bar.
- Roll out company-wide compliance initiatives: Drive programs across quality (including ASPICE), security, data privacy, and operational safety - from framework to embedded practice.
- Trusted partner across Wayve: A leader in the org, you partner with engineering, product, safety, security, privacy / legal, and operations leaders to land outcomes and hold the bar - influencing without authority at every level.
- Make process simple and low-overhead: Design pragmatic, lightweight processes that meet the bar with minimal friction; negotiate must-haves vs nice-to-haves and find creative ways to meet long-standing requirements.
- Establish scalable practices: Governance, KPIs and dashboards, audit readiness, escalations and operational reviews.
- Align cross-functionally: Work across every part of Wayve - and external auditors / partners where relevant; manage dependencies, risk, and trade-offs.
- Connect to outcomes and represent Quality & Compliance: Tie delivery to compliance status, audit readiness, risk reduction, and organisational efficiency, and represent quality & compliance in company-level reviews.
ABOUT YOU
In order to set you up for success as a Lead Technical Program Manager, Quality & Compliance at Wayve, we're looking for the following skills and experience.
Essential
- 8+ years in quality / compliance / process programs: Deep, hands-on experience delivering quality, compliance, or process programs as a technical program manager - ideally spanning standards such as ASPICE, ISO, security, privacy, or safety - including people and process leadership. You've built or scaled a program function and you get things done with ownership and a bias for action.
- People leadership: You build, coach, and grow high-performing teams, and raise the bar on the craft.
- Pragmatic and creative: You negotiate must-haves vs nice-to-haves, and find creative ways to meet requirements that have long been done a certain way - keeping process simple and low-overhead rather than adding bureaucracy.
- Exceptional communicator & influencer: This role crosses all of Wayve; you communicate with unusual clarity and influence without authority at every level, bringing people along.
- Very good at process: You design simple, low-overhead processes that raise quality and keep the organisation efficient.
- Stays neutral and adapts under pressure: Effective in ambiguous, fast-moving environments; you flex your style and bring structure without slowing delivery.
- Systems thinking: You reason about how the parts of a complex organisation and its processes fit together, and how a change in one area ripples into others.
- Product-minded: You focus on outcomes and the people your programs serve - prioritising by impact and defining what good looks like, not just tracking activity.
- Raises the bar without the drag: You strengthen quality and compliance while keeping the organisation efficient and fast-moving.
- Strategic & business impact: You link quality and compliance investment to measurable outcomes - audit readiness, risk reduction, and efficiency.
- Data-informed: You steer with the right metrics and evidence, and set direction with clarity.
- Growth mindset: Open to feedback and always looking to improve.
Desirable
- Working knowledge of automotive / safety-critical or security / privacy standards - e.g. Automotive SPICE (ASPICE), ISO 26262, SOTIF (ISO 21448), ISO 27001, or GDPR / data privacy.
- Background in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or another regulated / safety-critical domain.
- An engineering or computer science degree, or experience working as an engineer.
This is a full-time role based in our office in London. At Wayve we want the best of all worlds, so we operate a hybrid working policy that combines time together in our offices and workshops to fuel innovation, culture, relationships and learning, with time spent working from home.
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.