About the Position

Principal / Director, Technical Program Management - Driver Out

Location

Sunnyvale, California, USA

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

Hybrid

Department

Engineering Operations and Programs

Compensation

$299.1K – $373.4K • Offers Equity

About the Role

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 Program Management Team

Wayve’s Program Management team turns complex technical goals into coordinated delivery. Working closely with engineering, research, product, safety, and operations teams, we align priorities, manage dependencies, and bring clarity to ambiguous challenges. We combine technical depth with cross-functional leadership to help teams move faster, more effectively, and with purpose-focusing on meaningful outcomes rather than process for its own sake.

Your Day-to-Day

Partner with engineering, science, safety, product, and operations leaders, alongside external partners including OEMs and Uber, to align on scope, sequencing, and readiness.
Drive the programme’s critical path, turning complex technical, safety, and operational requirements into clear commitments, and managing dependencies, risks, and trade-offs across workstreams.
Coach and support your TPM team, set clear expectations, manage performance, and hold workstream leads accountable for delivery.
Run milestone and launch-readiness reviews, using KPIs and dashboards to assess progress, surface issues, and drive timely decisions, escalations, and risk-budget management.
Represent Driver Out to the executive team, communicating progress, risk, and readiness clearly and guiding the programme’s most consequential decisions.

What You’ll Be Working On

Owning the Driver Out programme end-to-end, defining and delivering the multi-year plan from the first driver-out demonstration through public-road product integration and initial scaling, connecting concept to operation.
Coordinating delivery across driving-model performance and safety, system architecture, verification and validation, vehicle hardware and software, remote assistance, and operations.
Bringing together the safety case, behaviour validation, functional safety (ISO 26262), SOTIF (ISO 21448), cybersecurity, and the Safety Management System into a credible, signed-off safety argument for driver-out.
Building and growing the programme’s TPM organisation, developing other leaders, and establishing the operating model, governance, and delivery practices needed to lead a programme of this scale.
Connecting Driver Out delivery to Wayve’s commercial path to market, making strategic trade-offs that keep the transition from driver-in to driver-out safe, achievable, and aligned with product outcomes.

Requirements

10+ years of experience delivering complex technical programmes, including director-level leadership.
Built and led programme-management teams, with direct responsibility for coaching, development, and performance management.
Extensive experience delivering autonomous-vehicle or comparable safety-critical robotics programmes.
Fluent in safety cases, behaviour validation, functional safety (ISO 26262), SOTIF (ISO 21448), and safety management systems.
Technically strong across autonomy, machine learning, vehicle hardware and software, and systems engineering.
Ability to align and influence engineering, science, safety, product, operations, and external partners at the most senior levels.
Stay objective under pressure and adapt your approach in ambiguous, high-stakes environments.
Product-minded and commercially aware, connecting programme decisions to the people the service will serve and Wayve’s path to market.
Set direction clearly, use the right metrics to steer delivery, and communicate complex risks and readiness decisions crisply to executives.
Open to feedback and continuously improve your own leadership, your team’s capabilities, and how the programme operates.

Nice to Have

Experience taking an AV programme to eyes-off or driverless operation, or launching a comparable safety-critical service.
Experience collaborating with OEMs and mobility partners, including ride-hail providers.
Engineering or computer science degree, or experience working as an engineer.

We Offer

Salaries benchmarked against the market annually
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

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

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 (TPM process, Cross-functional; 1 hour 45 minutes total)
Deep-dive technical interviews (Program Design, Leadership & Management; 1 hour 45 minutes total)
Final interview: mission & values alignment (30 minutes)

We’ll always explain the format and work around your availability.

A Quick Note

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.

Compensation Range: $299.1K - $373.4K

Principal / Director, Technical Program Management — Driver Out

Job description