Engineering Manager - Compute and Data Platform (AI Platform)
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.
🛠️ About our Engineering Teams
Behind Wayve’s embodied AI is the compute and data infrastructure that enables our ML engineers and researchers to train and run increasingly capable models. Our Compute Foundations team builds and operates the large-scale cloud infrastructure that makes this possible, spanning GPU compute, storage, workload scheduling and the platforms that support training and inference.
You’ll lead this London-based team through its next phase of growth, helping build and maintain a reliable, high-performance, multi-cloud and multi-region platform. The challenges go beyond provisioning resources: they include scheduling workloads across different GPU architectures, keeping valuable compute available, and moving data efficiently while managing costs.
You’ll lead a team working with state-of-the-art tooling to tackle infrastructure challenges found only at the world’s leading AI companies, building the platform that enables Wayve to develop its AI Driver.
🧠 Your day-to-day
People leadership will be your first priority. You’ll coach and develop engineers, set clear expectations, manage performance. You’ll build technical leadership within the team, giving engineers the support and ownership they need to grow. You will guide the growth of the team through hiring and onboarding.
Alongside this, you will own project prioritisation and roadmap planning, aligning priorities and delivery plans with stakeholders across Wayve. Your goal is to maximise the impact of the team in alignment with the department and company objectives. You will provide visibility into the state of systems you own through clear KPIs and dashboards.
Leading a highly technical team, you’ll bring the technical judgement to guide complex infrastructure decisions and turn competing needs into a clear roadmap. Working with technical leads, partner teams and cloud providers, you’ll balance reliability, performance, capacity and cost, and help the team deliver sustainably.
🧩 What you’ll be working on
- Leading and developing the team: Coach engineers through regular feedback and one-to-ones, manage performance, support career development and build a healthy, performant and accountable team.
- Hiring and building technical leadership: Lead hiring and onboarding as the team expands, and develop technical leads who can take ownership of key areas of the platform.
- Driving the roadmap and delivery: Translate training and inference needs into priorities, align commitments with available resources, and surface risks and dependencies early.
- Scaling cloud compute: Guide the evolution and operation of a multi-cloud, multi-region training and inference platform, including the adoption of new compute architectures (Nvidia Hopper, Blackwell; Qualcomm).
- Improving scheduling and availability: Oversee Kubernetes-based infrastructure and queuing and scheduling systems, enabling workloads to use the right resources across heterogeneous GPU environments.
- Planning capacity and cost: Partner with stakeholders and cloud providers on compute and storage forecasts, accounting for resource lead times, performance requirements and cost trade-offs.
- Ensuring efficient storage across clouds: Guide distributed storage and caching approaches that improve data access and reduce unnecessary duplication and cross-cloud transfer costs.
🙌 You should apply if
- You have a strong track record of managing and developing an infrastructure, platform or distributed systems engineering team, including hiring, coaching, performance management and career development.
- You have delivered through others, owning team priorities and balancing delivery with operational reliability and longer-term platform improvements.
- You have substantial experience in Kubernetes and workload queuing and scheduling systems, such as Kueue or equivalent technologies.
- You can reason about availability, capacity, performance and cost across complex cloud infrastructure, including the interaction between compute, storage and data movement.
- You understand large-scale GPU compute infrastructure for machine learning training or inference and the operational challenges of scaling beyond small GPU deployments.
- You can earn engineers’ trust through sound technical judgement without needing to be the team’s primary individual contributor. You have successfully delivered as an individual contributor in the past.
- You communicate clearly with technical teams, stakeholders and external providers, and can turn ambiguous requirements into practical priorities.
- You are able to work from our London office and lead a team based there.
The following experience would be useful but is not required:
- Operating multi-cloud or multi-region platforms for large-scale AI workloads.
- Introducing new GPU architectures or managing heterogeneous GPU fleets.
- Distributed storage, caching and data-locality strategies for data-intensive workloads.
- Capacity forecasting, cloud cost modelling and close collaboration with cloud infrastructure providers.
🌱 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 mins)
- Competency Interviews: system design and hiring manager interview
- Deep-dive technical interviews: technical leadership, code review and people management
- Final interview: leadership, 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. https://wayve.ai/careers/ To learn more about what drives us, visit Values at Wayve https://wayve.ai/careers/
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.