Machine Learning Engineer (Closed Loop)

EngineersOfAI; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Wayve is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer in the Simulation team to advance world models and planners for end‑to‑end autonomous driving research. You will drive generative simulation that enables faster training, broader testing, and scalable deployment across diverse environments.

As GAIA evolution continues, you will focus on efficient, interactive models with large‑scale rollouts and closed‑loop agent interactions, addressing new geography generalization and synthetic data challenges.

Qualifications

• Experience building generative world models for simulation tasks.
• Strong understanding of planning and RL for control in simulated environments.
• Ability to measure and improve model fidelity and stability.

Responsibilities

• Invent next‑generation, efficient generative world models for real‑time rollouts.
• Architect interactive world models enabling RL, planning and safety loops.
• Optimise end‑to‑end performance to reduce inference latency.
• Define metrics for coherence, physics fidelity and integration with planners.
• Ship models into closed‑loop training and evaluation pipelines.
• Mentor junior researchers and help shape technical roadmaps.
• Challenge assumptions and pursue bold ideas for training and evaluation.

Skills

Generative models

World models

Reinforcement learning

Planning

Safety evaluation

Tools

Diffusion models

Transformers

Job description

About us

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!

The role

Generative simulation 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.

Where you’ll have impact:

This role would sit within Simulation focusing on unlocking disruptive innovation that solves self-driving. We believe the next leap in autonomy comes from a world model that is faithful enough, and fast enough, to train and evaluate driving models in closed loop — not only to replay logs.

As a Machine Learning Engineer in the Simulation team, you’ll play a key role in developing next-generation world models and planners that can simulate complex, diverse, and temporally consistent driving environments. These generative simulation models (like GAIA) will power faster training, broader testing, and scalable deployment—even in areas and scenarios we’ve never driven in before.

As we push toward the next generation of GAIA, efficiency and interactivity become a great focus area: models must run thousands of roll‑outs per second, support closed-loop agent interaction and fit within practical compute budgets. This role will lead that leap.

You’ll work at the intersection of machine learning research, multi‑modal modeling, and real‑world deployment tackling questions like:

• How can we deploy AVs in a new geography without collecting any real‑world data?
• Can synthetically generated environments fully replace physical testing and data collection?

Key responsibilities

You will be a senior technical contributor inside Simulation, the team that incubates breakthrough ideas for Wayve. Your mandate:

• Invent next‑generation, efficient generative world‑models (diffusion, transformer or hybrid) that deliver real‑time roll‑outs and controllable scene editing.
• Architect interactive world models where agents (or humans) can step the model, enabling reinforcement learning, planning and safety evaluation loops.
• Optimise end‑to‑end performance – from latent compression to context pruning your aim is to reduce inference latency by orders of magnitude.
• Define robust metrics for long‑horizon coherence, physics fidelity and planner integration; run ablations and scaling studies to understand trade‑offs.
• Ship impact: integrate your models into closed‑loop training and evaluation, and measure the sim‑to‑real gap against on‑road driving‑model results.
• Mentor & influence: guide junior researchers, shape technical road‑maps, publish at top venues and represent Wayve in the community
• Challenge assumptions and drive innovation: propose bold ideas, conduct ablation studies, and question conventional approaches to training and evaluation.

About you

In order to set you up