User Experience Researcher jobs in United Kingdom

London

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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.

Where you’ll have impact:

This role would sit within Science focusing on unlocking disruptive innovation that solves self-driving. We believe the next big leap in autonomy won’t come from collecting more real-world data—it’ll come from learning to simulate the world with unprecedented fidelity and generalization.

As an Applied Scientist in the Science 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-2) will power faster training, broader testing, and scalable deployment—even in areas and scenarios we’ve never driven in before. GAIA-2 added multi-camera consistency, fine-grained control and richer geographic diversity, letting us stress-test autonomy at scale.

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 Leader inside Science, 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 with fleet-scale training, synthetic-to-real evaluation and on-vehicle deployment tests.
• 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 for success as a Staff Applied Scientist at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.

• 6+ years of experience in ML research/engineering with a focus on generative video, world models.
• Deep knowledge in diffusion & latent-video models; track record of improving sampling efficiency or model throughput
• Ability to set technical vision and lead cross-functional teams
• Experience working with high-dimensional temporal or spatial-temporal data (e.g., video, multi-sensor fusion).
• Strong Python and PyTorch engineering fundamentals, and experience building research-grade production tools.
• Strong publication record or contributions to open-source ML tooling.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced, innovative, interdisciplinary team environment.
• Experience in AVs, robotics, simulation, or other embodied AI domains.
• Experience working with synthetic-to-real transfer.

Why Join Us

• Work on transformative technology with real-world impact on mobility, safety, and AI.
• Access massive driving datasets, cutting-edge infrastructure, and world-class research talent.
• Be part of a high-trust, high-autonomy team that values creativity, experimentation, and deep thinking.
• Publish, share, and shape the future of generative AI for autonomy.

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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