Senior Data Scientist

About the Position

Senior Data Scientist

Join Wayve as a Senior Data Scientist to develop actionable insights for our AI Driver, advancing functionality, safety, and performance.

Location

Sunnyvale, California, USA

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Simulation, Evaluation, Validation

Compensation

• $209.7K – $240K

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. Every role here, whatever the team, plugs into that.

Here’s what this particular role covers.

🛠️ About our Engineering Teams

As a Data Scientist supporting AI Engineers, you will partner with one or more engineering teams to develop actionable insights that guide improvements to the Wayve AI Driver. Through experimental and observational analyses of real and simulated driving, you will help teams advance the functionality, safety, and performance of the Wayve AI Driver.

🧠 Your day-to-day

You will work closely with engineering and cross-functional partners to turn data into clear, practical direction. Your findings will help teams understand performance, validate product requirements, and prioritize the opportunities that matter most.

You will be comfortable working asynchronously across time zones, communicating findings clearly and compellingly, and influencing team direction through evidence.

🧩 What you’ll be working on:

• Formulating and iterating on the performance metrics that organize our engineering efforts and guide progress towards commercial success.
• Designing experiments and targeted off-road measurements to help ensure we deliver customer product requirements while maintaining safety and performance.
• Investigating factors in model training and inference that create bottlenecks in functionality and performance.
• Identifying, testing, and validating hypotheses that can unlock improvements to the Wayve AI Driver.
• Summarizing, visualizing, and communicating findings in an accessible way that supports prioritization and strategy.

🙌 You should apply if:

• Experience: You have 3+ years of experience in a Data Science role.
• Skills:
  • Fluent in querying and building large datasets, including writing production-level SQL for data-transformation pipelines.
  • Experience designing robust real-world experiments, such as A/B tests, and critically evaluating test statistics.
  • Strong statistical foundations, including selecting appropriate distributions and testing the assumptions behind frequentist statistics.
  • Proficient in a statistical scripting language and data science or machine-learning packages, such as Python with pandas, sklearn, statsmodels, or scipy, or R with dplyr, caret, or stats.
  • Skilled at summarizing, visualizing, and communicating findings in an accessible and compelling way.
  • Experienced in influencing team direction through your findings and bringing a bias towards actionable insight that can drive prioritization and strategy.
  • Comfortable working asynchronously across time zones with cross-functional partners.
  • Deeply curious about building something new and excited by the opportunity to help define AV2.0 and how we build it.

Nice to Have:

• Practical machine-learning experience, for example, with PyTorch, and a passion for taking research ideas to production.
• A track record of promoting statistical rigor and experimental best practices.
• Experience with causal inference, econometric techniques, or Bayesian methodologies for hypothesis testing.
• Experience working with large datasets and distributed computing technologies, such as Spark, Hadoop, or other map-reduce tools.
• Experience working in a fast-moving technology company or startup.

🌱 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.

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, generalize, 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+ 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 generalizable 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 (Hiring Manager interview and SQL or Python programming interview) 45/60 min
• Deep-dive technical interviews (Quant Domain interview and Causal Inference Case Study) 60 min each
• Final leadership interview (30 mins)

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

What’s in it for you

💰 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. 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: $209.7K - $240K