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Wayve is seeking an Applied Scientist Manager for their On-Road Innovation team in London. This pivotal role combines hands-on machine learning research with team leadership. The successful candidate will help drive advancements in autonomy while nurturing a talent-rich team, making a significant impact on the future of autonomous driving technologies.
London
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.
Founded in 2017, Wayve is the leading developer of Embodied AI technology. Our advanced AI software and foundation models enable vehicles to perceive, understand, and navigate any complex environment, enhancing the usability and safety of automated driving systems.
Our vision is to create autonomy that propels the world forward. Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic AI products are designed for automakers, accelerating the transition from assisted to automated driving.
In our fast-paced environment big problems ignite us—we embrace uncertainty, leaning into complex challenges to unlock groundbreaking solutions. We aim high and stay humble in our pursuit of excellence, constantly learning and evolving as we pave the way for a smarter, safer future.
At Wayve, your contributions matter. We value diversity, embrace new perspectives, and foster an inclusive work environment; we back each other to deliver impact.
Make Wayve the experience that defines your career!
Science is the team that is advancing our end-to-end autonomous driving research. The team’s mission is to accelerate our journey to AV2.0 and ensure the future success of Wayve by incubating and investing in new ideas that have the potential to become game-changing technological advances for the company.
What this team is solving:
Our focus is on algorithmic advances in reinforcement learning, efficient model architectures, and multimodal representation learning — all aimed at expanding the capabilities of Wayve's AI Driver.
We're not just optimising for performance — we're pushing the frontiers of what driving intelligence can understand, adapt to, and explain. The team is designing AI models that are more efficient, more robust to rare events and real-world complexity, and more interpretable.
By advancing core features like temporal abstraction, latent action modeling, and data-adaptive learning, our goal is to deliver an AI driver that learns faster, adapts better, and earns trust through transparency.
Where you’ll have impact
As an Applied Scientist Manager in the Science department in the On-Road Innovation team, you will play a pivotal role at the intersection of technical contribution and team development. You’ll split your time between hands-on ML research and leading a high-performing interdisciplinary team of applied scientists and ML engineers (up to 6 reports), all working in a tightly aligned research program.
Your team will work across multimodal learning, latent action spaces, planning, reinforcement learning, world modelling, and efficient AI. You’ll contribute directly to these efforts, guiding experimental design, implementation, and analysis. In parallel, you'll help others make faster progress through technical mentoring, peer feedback, and shaping a culture of executional and scientific excellence.
This is a career-track manager position for a high-agency scientist who is excited to grow as a leader — not by stepping away from the technical frontier, but by staying at the core of it. You’ll help scale both science and people, driving forward new capabilities in autonomy while enabling others to thrive and innovate alongside you.
Key responsibilities:
Technical Contributions & Leadership
Team Management & Cross-Functional Execution
In order to set you up for success as a Research Manager at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.
Nice to have
This role might not be for you if
We understand that everyone has a unique set of skills and experiences and that not everyone will meet all of the requirements listed above. If you’re passionate about self-driving cars and think you have what it takes to make a positive impact on the world, we encourage you to apply.
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.
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