Site Reliability Engineering Manager, Vehicle Software

EngineersOfAI; Sunnyvale (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Wayve seeks an experienced SRE Manager to build the Vehicle Software SRE team from the ground up, defining its charter and hiring its founding engineers.

You will set the operating model, own reliability strategy across deployment, telemetry, and diagnostics, and remain hands-on with code and design reviews.

This role places you at the intersection of software, hardware, networking, and sensors, directly influencing safety and fleet scalability.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and operating production software systems with strong depth in SRE, production engineering, platform engineering, embedded systems, or robotics.
• 3+ years in people management or leadership roles.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a new SRE team from the ground up, staying hands-on as a player-coach on the team's most consequential work.
• Own technical direction for vehicle software reliability across deployment, service health, telemetry, and diagnostics; define what production-ready means.
• Define SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for fleet-critical workflows; drive release criteria, automated gates, rollback strategies, and fault-injection practices.
• Design and implement observability and automation to shorten time from symptom to root cause, reduce toil, and improve robustness.
• Lead investigations into complex failures, ensure durable fixes, and strengthen on-call practices and escalation paths.
• Mentor engineers and provide leadership with clarity on reliability health, risks, and investment.

Skills

SRE leadership

Production engineering

Platform engineering

Embedded systems

Robotics

Architecture reviews

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

As SRE Manager, you'll build the Vehicle Software SRE team from the ground up — defining its charter, hiring its founding engineers, establishing the operating model, and creating the technical strategy that makes reliability a first-class property of the software running on our vehicles.

You'll work in a production environment unlike most: a globally distributed fleet of autonomous vehicles operating at the intersection of software, hardware, networking, sensors, and the physical world. Failures are often intermittent, hard to reproduce, and distributed across ownership boundaries. You'll move reliability upstream — from reactive field support to prevention through architecture, automation, observability, and disciplined production readiness.

You'll embed your team within Vehicle Software, partnering with product teams who retain ownership of what they build while your team provides the reliability engineering, standards, and leverage that help them operate fleet‑critical software safely at scale. You'll stay hands‑on throughout — writing code, reviewing critical designs, and leading the investigations that matter most.

The systems you help harden will connect Wayve's AI to physical vehicles and underpin the transition from engineering fleets to commercial operations. Few engineering leadership roles offer this combination of zero‑to‑one team building, deep systems work, and direct influence on the safety and scalability of autonomous mobility.

Key Responsibilities

• Team building & leadership :Build and lead a new SRE team from the ground up, staying hands‑on as a player‑coach on the team's most consequential work.
• Reliability strategy: Own technical direction for vehicle software reliability across deployment, service health, telemetry, and diagnostics; define what production-ready means at Wayve.
• Production readiness:Define SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for fleet‑critical workflows; drive release criteria, automated gates, rollback strategies, and fault‑injection practices across Vehicle Software.
• Observability & tooling:Design and implement the observability and automation that shortens the path from vehicle symptom to root cause, cuts the manual toil between failure and fix, and shapes systems for robustness, recoverability, and debuggability.
• Incident response:Lead investigations into complex failures, ensure every incident produces a durable fix, and strengthen on‑call practices and escalation paths across service‑owning teams.
• Mentorship & communication: Mentor engineers and emerging leaders, and give senior leadership the clarity on reliability health, risks, and investment they need to make good decisions.

About you

Essential

• 8+ years building and operating production software systems with strong depth in SRE, production engineering, platform engineering, embedded systems, or robotics, and a recent track record of writing production‑quality code and leading architecture reviews across Linux‑based, distributed, or hardware‑software systems.
• 3+ years in people