Research Scientist jobs in United Kingdom

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.

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!

We're looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to join the core team building Wayve's next-generation Foundation Model for autonomy. This is a rare opportunity to work on a high-impact, multi-modal model—combining video, LiDAR, radar, and language—designed for real-world deployment at scale. You'll be embedded in a small, high-leverage team in London, contributing directly to modeling breakthroughs in scaling laws, mixture-of-experts, and attention architectures. Your work will help define how embodied AI systems learn to act in complex, dynamic environments.

Key responsibilities:

• Design and scale core components of the Wayve Foundation Model (e.g. attention, MoE, KV caching)
• Lead empirical research on scaling laws for multi-modal models
• Develop and optimize distributed training strategies (e.g. FSDP, large-batch training)
• Collaborate with teams across perception, policy, and infra to integrate and evaluate model improvements
• Contribute to the broader research community through papers, benchmarks, and shared insights

What you'll bring to Wayve

• Essential
  
  • Experience developing and training large-scale machine learning models, ideally foundation models
  • Strong understanding of modern modeling techniques such as Transformers, Mixture-of-Experts, and attention variants (e.g. linearized or memory-efficient attention)
  • Applied experience with multi-modal data (e.g. video, LiDAR, radar, and/or language)
  • Solid background in distributed training and scaling infrastructure (e.g. FSDP, KV caching, large-batch optimization)
  • 3-5 years of experience post-PhD or equivalent industry experience in applied ML research
  • Familiarity with training frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, DeepSpeed, or custom infra for large models
  • Demonstrated track record of publications in top-tier ML/CV conferences (e.g. NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR)
• Desirable
  
  • Hands-on contributions to scaling law research or empirical model scaling at scale
  • Experience working on models for real-world robotics, autonomy, or perception
  • Experience in autonomous driving or end-to-end learning.

What we offer you

• Attractive compensation with salary and equity
• Immersion in a team of world-class researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs
• A unique position to shape the future of autonomy and tackle the biggest challenge of our time
• Bespoke learning and development opportunities
• Relocation support with visa sponsorship
• Flexible working hours - we trust you to do your job well, at times that suit you and your time
• Benefits such as an onsite chef, workplace nursery scheme, private health insurance, therapy, daily yoga, onsite bar, large social budgets, unlimited L&D requests, enhanced parental leave, and more!

This is a full-time role based in our office in London. At Wayve we want the best of all worlds so we operate a hybrid working policy that combines time together in our offices and workshops to fuel innovation, culture, relationships and learning, and time spent working from home.

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.

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.