Tech Lead, Autonomy Performance - Robotaxi

Before the detail, here's the challenge you'd help us solve.

We build the embodied intelligence that moves real vehicles safely, and the ecosystem a billion machines will run on in the future. Very few people in AI can say this. Every role here, whatever the team, plugs into that.

Here’s what this particular role covers.

The role

This is a high-impact technical leadership role and a key founding member position at the centre of Wayve’s Robotaxi launch, providing a unique opportunity to set direction and definition for the autonomy performance function.
We are specifically looking for product-oriented engineers who will own the autonomy performance bar that determines whether the product is ready for the public and stays great release over release. You’ll turn messy real-world driving signals into trusted metrics, a prioritised funnel of issues, and cross-team execution that lands measurable improvements in production.
This is an opportunity to define “performance” for an end-to-end learned driving system where traditional AV playbooks don’t translate cleanly, with visibility and influence across the teams shaping the stack. This is primarily hands-on IC, with a clear growth path and expectation to transition into leading a small team as the Robotaxi program scales.

Key responsibilities:

• Own and evolve the autonomy performance measurement framework for Robotaxi (driving + pick-up / drop-off), including the metrics, dashboards, and narrative used by leadership to make ship/no-ship decisions

• Build and run the end-to-end performance improvement loop: detect issues, triage and prioritise, drive root-cause investigations, and ensure fixes land across model, robot software, backend, and evaluation tooling

• Lead cross-functional execution across AV core, evaluation/validation, robotics, robot software, triage/systems, and SRE—often without direct reporting authority—aligning roadmaps to performance outcomes

• Define and enforce performance release gates and regression detection for production deployments; own readiness calls, post-release monitoring, and follow-through on incidents/regressions

• Be hands-on in the data and code when needed (Python/C++/SQL) to accelerate debugging, validate hypotheses, and unblock delivery

About you

In order to set you up for success as a Tech Lead within the robotaxi team here at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.

Essential

• Demonstrated cross-functional engineering leadership: you’ve led complex delivery across multiple teams and stakeholders to achieve production outcomes (without relying on direct line management)

• Strong product and customer orientation; able to connect technical performance metrics to rider experience, operational outcomes, and launch readiness

• Strong autonomy/robotics performance debugging experience, including deep hands-on work with real-world issues and time-series / real-time signals (not just managing a queue)

• Strong technical foundations in learned systems / ML-driven robotics: you can reason about model behaviour, failure modes, and measurement pitfalls in data-driven autonomy stacks

• Production fluency in Python, C++ and SQL, with the ability to work directly in code and analytics pipelines to diagnose problems and validate improvements

Desirable

• Experience owning or co-owning releases to a fleet of robots/vehicles in production, including defining release processes, gates, rollback plans, and regression handling

• Familiarity with modern data/observability stacks used in autonomy programs (e.g., Databricks/SQL, Grafana, internal eval/sim tooling, dashboarding/reporting)

• Track record of building scalable triage systems and performance programs (metrics taxonomy, prioritisation frameworks, quality bars) in safety- or mission-critical environments

This is a full-time role based in our office in London.  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.

A quick, honest note before you apply.

Wayve is not a mature, fully-structured place with the playbook already written. Much of how we work is still being written, and if you join, you’ll help write it. That suits people who want real ownership more than people who need a settled structure from day one.

If that sounds like the kind of problem you want to spend your time on, we’d really like to hear from you.