Senior ML Engineer: Vector Search & Multimodal Indexing

Wayve; Sunnyvale (CA); Hybrid; USD 312,000 - 351,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive equity package

Job summary

Wayve is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for the Search & Indexing team in Sunnyvale, CA. You will help scale and evolve indexing infrastructure that powers vector-based and metadata-based retrieval across vast driving-data corpora.

You will own complex components, contribute to architecture, and drive MVP delivery for the indexing stack while collaborating across ML, platform, and data teams.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or ML systems, building production systems.
• Experience with vector databases or ANN technologies such as FAISS, LanceDB, or similar.
• Strong understanding of multimodal embeddings and evaluating search quality (relevance, recall, filtering).
• Strong coding skills in Python or other systems languages.
• Experience building search services, APIs, and large-scale ingestion and indexing pipelines.
• Experience delivering 0→1 systems in ambiguous spaces.
• Comfortable working across infra, ML, and data curation boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate production search and indexing systems at billion-vector scale.
• Evaluate embedding models for semantic and multimodal retrieval, including versioning and integration.
• Develop evaluation frameworks for retrieval quality, latency, and cost.
• Build backend services and APIs for vector similarity and metadata-filtered search.
• Own search components from design through deployment and production operations.
• Collaborate with ML, Data, and Evaluation teams to integrate search into workflows.
• Mentor other engineers through code reviews and knowledge sharing.

Skills

Backend engineering

Infrastructure

ML systems

Python programming

APIs & services

Team mentoring

Tools

FAISS

LanceDB

Vector databases

Python

Job description

Wayve is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for the Search & Indexing team in Sunnyvale, CA. You will help scale and evolve indexing infrastructure that powers vector-based and metadata-based retrieval across vast driving-data corpora.

You will own complex components, contribute to architecture, and drive MVP delivery for the indexing stack while collaborating across ML, platform, and data teams.