Director of Platform Management for Simulation, Evaluation & Validation

Wayve; Sunnyvale (CA); Hybrid; USD 332,000 - 415,000; Full time

Job summary

Wayve is looking for a Director of Platform Management for Simulation, Evaluation & Validation to set the product vision for their AI development platforms. This leadership role involves managing product strategy, overseeing teams, and ensuring high-quality developer experiences.

The position requires extensive product management experience, strong data-driven decision-making skills, and familiarity with AI tools. This full-time role is based in Sunnyvale, California and operates under a hybrid working policy.

Qualifications

• 0+ years of product management experience, leading PM teams for 3-5 years.
• Experience building developer tools or ML/AI evaluation infrastructures.
• Data-driven approach to defining customer-facing KPIs.
• Understanding of how decisions in the stack affect outcomes.
• Record of analysis impacting critical AI program decisions.
• Focus on workflows and product management best practices.

Responsibilities

• Set product vision and strategy for simulation and validation platforms.
• Own the product roadmap and ensure team alignment.
• Lead and grow the product management team.
• Build world-class developer experiences through user research.
• Set quality standards for reliability and performance.
• Establish operational cadences for reporting and planning.
• Represent platform externally to partners and regulators.

Skills

Product management experience

Building internal platforms

Data driven

Systems thinking

Insight-driven leadership

Product craft

AI Fluency

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

Director of Platform Management for Simulation, Evaluation & Validation

You will lead the overall product vision and direction for the platforms that Wayve uses to develop, evaluate, and validate the AI Driver. This includes open and closed loop simulation platforms, the evaluation test platform, synthetic data production, critical event pipelines, validation, and the workflows that connect them.

You will directly lead and indirectly influence sub‑team platform leads across Simulation, Evaluation, Data, and Validation to convert a complex set of cross‑cutting initiatives into a single, opinionated product strategy. The role is part developer‑tools PM (your users are engineers and scientists who will tell you immediately when something is slow, wrong, or in the way), part platform PM (your roadmap has to compose across simulators, datasets, evaluation, and triage), and part safety‑systems PM (the outputs gate releases that put cars on real roads).

You will help shape and set vision for how our tools and services should function and work in an AV2.0 context – a Wayve‑pioneered approach to both the driving stack and offline development.

Key Responsibilities

• Set product vision and strategy for the platforms. Define a multi‑year, multi‑quarter product strategy that takes Wayve from a collection of capable tools to a unified, opinionated platform for evaluating and validating the AI Driver. Anchor the strategy in measurable customer outcomes — developer velocity, signal quality, cost per evaluation, time‑to‑insight, validation credibility.
• Own the product roadmap end‑to‑end. Translate company‑level priorities into a coherent roadmap across simulation, evaluation, and validation initiatives. Drive trade‑offs between different internal and external customer groups. Ensure resourcing decisions are clearly communicated to other director‑level stakeholders.
• Lead and grow the team. Manage and mentor the product managers embedded across. Hire to fill gaps, level up the craft, and build a highly capable lean team.
• Build world‑class developer experiences. Run regular user research with Autonomy, Science, Validation, Release, and Product teams. Maintain a clear picture of what each customer segment needs from the platform, where the friction is, and which gaps are quietly bleeding velocity.
• Define and defend quality bars for an internal platform. Set platform‑wide standards for reliability, latency, cost per unit (per simulation, per evaluation, per enriched hour), self‑service, observability, and API stability. Treat platform regressions the way a consumer team treats a churn spike.
• Establish regular operational cadences. Lead monthly business reviews and close the loop on requests and progress reporting with the leadership team. Lead quarterly planning, KPI reviews, and the trade‑off conversations.
• Represent the platform externally. Help Wayve's leadership tell a credible story about how we develop and validate the AI Driver — to OEM partners, regulators, and at relevant industry forums.

About You

Essential

• 0+ years of product management experience, with at least 3–5 years leading PM teams (PMs and/or senior PMs reporting to you).
• Track record building internal platforms, developer tools, or ML/AI evaluation infrastructure — products whose users are engineers and scientists, where the bar is set by power users with strong opinions and the ability to route around you if the tool isn't good enough.
• Data driven. You always seek to answer questions with data and lean into defining the right customer‑facing KPIs indicative of success.
• Systems thinking across hardware, AI, and product. You understand how decisions in one part of the stack (data, simulator fidelity, metric design) propagate into outcomes (release confidence, on‑road performance, regulator trust) elsewhere.
• Insight‑driven leader. A record of producing the analysis or framing that changed a "go/no-go" decision on a complex AI or robotics program.
• Product craft. You care about workflows, latency, errors‑per‑hour, and how a tool feels. You apply product management best practices to measuring user experience.
• AI Fluency. You not only regularly use but are a standard bearer in the application of AI tools to the job.

Desirable

• Prior experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or another safety‑critical AI/ML program (L2+, L4, surgical robotics, aerospace autonomy, etc.).
• Familiarity with simulation, synthetic data, evaluation harnesses, or ML observability tools at production scale.
• Working knowledge of SOTIF (ISO 21448), ISO 26262, or other safety standards relevant to validating learned systems.
• Experience with internal developer platforms (CI/CD, ML platforms, data platforms) at scale.

This is a full‑time role based in‑office. 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.

The reasonably estimated salary for this role ranges from $332,000 to $415,000, plus a competitive equity package. Actual compensation is based on the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience.

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.

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.

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.