About the Position

Staff Software Engineer, Model Development Platform

Location

Sunnyvale, California, USA

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

Hybrid

Department

AI Platform

Compensation

$276,100 – $293,750 • 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. Every role here, whatever the team, plugs into that.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Model Development Platform, you'll own the architecture of the cloud services that power Wayve's AI model lifecycle, from data and training workflows to experiment scheduling, evaluation, and on-road testing. You'll build the secure, reliable, and scalable foundations (identity and access, microservices, micro-frontends, deployment, and rollback) that let researchers and engineers iterate fast and ship autonomous driving models safely.

Responsibilities

Scalable, reliable cloud services: Design and evolve the architecture of major platform services for reliability, observability, security, and scalability. Help set availability, latency, and performance targets (SLAs/SLOs) and drive the practices to meet them.
Authentication & authorization: Own the identity, access control, and auditability layer across platform services and applications, ensuring access to sensitive models and fleet data is secure, consistent, and easy to adopt.
Microservices & micro-frontends: Define the patterns, boundaries, and shared tooling for backend microservices and micro-frontends, so teams can build and release independently while systems interoperate cleanly.
Deployment & rollback infrastructure: Build robust CI/CD, progressive delivery, and fast, safe rollback, with the observability, alerting, and self-healing needed to ship often and recover quickly.
End-to-end technical ownership: Take significant services and multi-quarter initiatives from problem definition and design through to production operation, making clear trade-offs between speed, scalability, security, and operational simplicity.
Cross-team technical leadership: Connect your area with adjacent disciplines, from experiment scheduling and data pipelines to distributed compute, and lead design reviews that establish reusable patterns.
Hands-on problem solving: Tackle the hardest technical challenges in your subteams with pragmatic solutions that balance innovation and operational simplicity.
Strategic collaboration: Partner with Product, Research, Design, and Operations to align technical solutions with user needs and contribute to the platform's long-term roadmap.

Requirements

Technical leadership: 7+ years designing and building large-scale distributed systems, cloud platforms, or developer platforms, including at senior or staff level.
Cloud services & architecture: Proven ability to design and operate scalable microservice architectures on a major cloud provider, with strong grounding in API design, data modeling, asynchronous workflows, and distributed-systems fundamentals.
Security & access control: Hands-on experience implementing authentication and authorization (e.g., OAuth2/OIDC, RBAC) with sound security practices.
Reliability & delivery: Experience driving reliability improvements, defining SLAs/SLOs, and building observable, self-healing, highly available systems. Experience with CI/CD, containerization and orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), infrastructure as code, and safe release and rollback strategies.
Hands-on engineering: Ability to write and review production-quality code in languages such as Python or TypeScript, with a good understanding of modern web architectures including React and micro-frontends.
End-to-end ownership: A track record of taking significant services from design through deployment and production operation.
Collaborative influence & mentorship: Excellent communication and cross-functional skills, with a track record of mentoring engineers through design discussions, code reviews, and pairing, and of fostering a culture of engineering excellence.

Nice to Have

Experience building internal developer platforms, workflow systems, or tools for ML researchers and engineers.
Familiarity with ML operations, such as training, evaluation, experiment tracking, and artifact management.
Experience with data pipelines, distributed job orchestration, event-driven architectures, or large-scale compute (e.g., Spark, Ray, Airflow, MLflow).
Experience with service mesh, API gateways, or feature-flagging and progressive-delivery tooling.
Knowledge of privacy, compliance, and secure handling of sensitive or large-scale data.
Experience in autonomous systems, robotics, simulation, or another safety-critical domain.

About Our Engineering Teams

The Model Development Platform team builds the infrastructure and tooling behind Wayve’s AI model lifecycle, from data ingestion and training to experiment scheduling and on-road testing. Our work spans AI research, large-scale distributed systems, and robotic operations, and lets researchers and engineers iterate fast and deploy autonomous driving models safely.

We Offer

Competitive salary
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

About the Company

🚀 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.

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 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.

The Interview Process

Our process is clear and respectful of your time:

Initial call / recruiter screen
HM meeting
Deep-dive technical interviews [programming, system design & domain-specific interviews; 4 hours total]
Final interview: mission & values alignment

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

Diversity and Inclusion

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: $276,100 - $293,750

Staff Software Engineer, Model Development Platform

Job description