Vice President, AI Data

Wayve; Sunnyvale (CA); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

Wayve is seeking a VP of Data to lead the data strategy behind our autonomous driving technology. This senior engineering leadership role owns data acquisition, enrichment and how data translates into measurable improvements in model performance.

You will determine what data matters and build the strategy, organisation and learning loop to accelerate learning. You will lead Wayve’s Data organisation across AI, Science, Validation, Product, Compute and Commercial teams, partnering across multiple

Qualifications

• Significant engineering leadership experience building high-performing teams.
• Deep technical expertise in AI/vision or related perception problems.
• Experience leading large-scale data capabilities that influence model training and evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Own data strategy across the AI learning cycle and determine data needs.
• Lead learning loop from real-world signals to training, evaluation and deployment.
• Develop data discovery and enrichment at scale across fleets, OEMs and partners.
• Establish measurement of data value and trade-offs to maximise model performance.

Skills

Data strategy

Engineering leadership

AI/ML fundamentals

Data discovery

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

N/A

Job description

The role

At Wayve, we are building AI that learns to drive from experience.

The role

At Wayve, we are building AI that learns to drive from experience. We do not hand-code cars to drive. We train our models from data gathered across the real world, making our ability to identify, understand and learn from the right data fundamental to everything we build. We are looking for a VP of Data to lead the data strategy behind our autonomous driving technology. This is a senior engineering leadership role with end-to-end ownership of how Wayve uses data to improve our AI. You will determine what data we need, how we acquire it, how we understand and enrich it, and ultimately how we turn it into measurable improvements in model performance. The scale and shape of the problem is unique. Our data comes from our own vehicles, OEM programmes, partners and external sources, spanning different vehicles, sensors, markets and driving environments. Within that corpus, the most valuable examples are often the hardest to find: rare behaviours, unusual interactions, safety-critical events and the long tail of real-world driving. Your job is not simply to build the systems that process this data. It is to decide what data matters and why, and build the strategy, organisation and learning loop that allows Wayve to learn from it faster. You will lead Wayve’s Data organisation and provide senior ownership for data within Engineering, partnering closely across AI, Science, Validation, Product, Compute and our commercial teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Own Wayve’s data strategy: Set the strategy across the complete AI learning cycle, determining what data we need and how it should drive model performance, from foundation model training through specialised driving capabilities and production programmes.
• Build the data flywheel: Own the learning loop from real-world signals and model behaviour through data discovery, curation and enrichment into training, evaluation, deployment and measurement.
• Find the data that matters: Develop intelligent approaches to discovering rare, surprising and safety-critical scenarios within extremely large datasets, using techniques such as embeddings, semantic search, learned representations and model-driven data selection.
• Lead data acquisition and enrichment: Define how Wayve collects, buys, generates and enriches data across our own fleet, OEM programmes, partners and external sources, balancing coverage, quality, speed and economics.
• Connect data investment to model performance: Establish how we measure the value of data and make rigorous trade-offs across quality, accuracy, speed, cost and scale, ensuring investment is focused where it creates the greatest impact.
• Scale our data strategy globally: Build an approach that supports multiple OEMs, vehicle platforms, sensor configurations, geographies and regulatory environments while maintaining a scalable global architecture.
• Build and lead the organisation: Lead and develop a high-performing, multidisciplinary Data organisation, partnering closely with AI, Science, Validation, Product, Compute, Finance and Commercial teams.

About You

You are a senior technical leader who has operated at the intersection of AI, data and large-scale model development. You can set direction in ambiguity and make high-quality decisions without perfect information. You are equally comfortable going deep into the characteristics and value of a dataset, challenging how a team measures model improvement, making significant investment decisions, or defining how an organisation should operate. You have strong technical judgement, but think about data through the impact it has on the intelligence and performance of the system, rather than simply the infrastructure required to store and process it. You can hold the full system in your head while still going deep on the details that matter.

Essential

• Significant engineering leadership experience, with a track record of building and leading high-performing technical organisations.
• Deep technical expertise in computer vision, video, multimodal AI or related perception problems.
• Experience leading large-scale data capabilities that directly influence model training, evaluation and performance.
• Strong intuition for what makes data valuable, with experience in data discovery, selection, curation and enrichment at scale.
• Strong technical and commercial judgement, including making trade-offs across quality, speed, cost, scale and build-versus-partner decisions.
• Ability to move between strategy and technical detail, set direction in ambiguity, and influence effectively across senior technical and business stakeholders.

Desirable

Experience in one or more of the following areas would be a strong advantage:

• Autonomous driving, robotics or embodied AI.
• Large-scale video, multimodal or foundation model training.
• Semantic search, embeddings, active learning, auto-labelling or other approaches to intelligent data selection and enrichment.
• Large-scale real-world data acquisition across fleets, customers, partners or multiple geographies.

This is a full-time role based in either our in Sunnyvale or London 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.

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