Vice President, AI Data

Location

London, United Kingdom; Sunnyvale, California, USA

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

Hybrid

Department

AI Platform

About the Position

At Wayve, we are building AI that learns to drive from experience. Our Data organisation sits at the heart of this learning loop, working across AI, Science, Validation, Product, Compute, and our commercial programmes to determine what data Wayve needs, how we acquire and understand it, and how we turn it into measurable improvements in our AI Driver.

We are looking for a VP of Data to lead this organisation and own the data strategy behind Wayve’s autonomous driving technology.

Responsibilities

• Owning Wayve’s data strategy: Set the strategy across the complete AI learning cycle and determine where data can have the greatest impact on model capability and performance.
• Building the data flywheel: Own the learning loop from real-world signals and model behaviour through data discovery, curation, and enrichment into training, evaluation, deployment, and measurement.
• Finding the data that matters: Develop intelligent approaches to discovering rare, surprising, and safety-critical scenarios within extremely large datasets, using techniques such as embeddings, semantic search, learned representations, and model-driven data selection.
• Leading data acquisition and enrichment: Define how Wayve collects, buys, generates, and enriches data across our own fleet, OEM programmes, partners, and external sources, balancing coverage, quality, speed, and economics.
• Connecting data investment to model performance: Establish how we measure the value of data and make rigorous trade-offs across quality, accuracy, speed, cost, and scale, ensuring investment is focused where it creates the greatest impact.
• Scaling our data strategy globally: Build an approach that supports multiple OEMs, vehicle platforms, sensor configurations, geographies, and regulatory environments while maintaining a scalable global architecture.
• Building and leading the organisation: Develop a high-performing, multidisciplinary Data organisation capable of operating across Wayve’s research, engineering, and commercial programmes.

Requirements

• Senior engineering or technical leader with significant experience building and leading high-performing technical organisations.
• Operated at the intersection of AI, data, and large-scale model development, with data capabilities that directly influence model training, evaluation, and performance.
• Deep technical expertise in areas such as computer vision, video, multimodal AI, perception, or related large-scale ML problems.
• Strong intuition for what makes data valuable and experience with data discovery, selection, curation, and enrichment at scale.
• Ability to move comfortably between strategy and technical detail, from defining an organisation-wide data strategy to going deep on a dataset, model behaviour, or learning loop.
• Strong technical and commercial judgement and experience making meaningful trade-offs across quality, speed, cost, scale, and build-versus-partner decisions.
• Comfortable setting direction in ambiguity and influencing senior technical and business stakeholders across organisational boundaries.

Nice to Have

• Experience in autonomous driving, robotics, or embodied AI.
• Experience with large-scale video or multimodal foundation model training, semantic search, embeddings, active learning, auto-labelling, or large-scale real-world data acquisition.

We Offer

• 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 opportunity to work closely with our vehicles, workshops, and labs
• Learning and development support, including training, conferences, and opportunities for continued growth
• Comprehensive location-dependent benefits including health insurance, dental, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, retirement or pension support, 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, 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+ 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.

This role can be based in either our London or Sunnyvale office.

Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

Wayve is committed to creating an inclusive interview experience. If you require any accommodations or adjustments to participate fully in our interview process, please let us know.

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, 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, or any other basis protected by applicable law.

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.

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.