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.

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

We’re looking for a senior Applied Scientist to lead the design and experimentation of Wayve’s core pretraining datasets for foundation models in embodied AI. This is a high-impact opportunity to shape the data that drives model generalization across cities, embodiments, and reasoning tasks. You'll work across research, data, and engineering teams to build world-class multi-modal datasets and define how we evaluate and improve them at scale.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the design, curation, and analysis of large-scale pretraining datasets for embodied AI
• Develop and run data-centric experiments to optimize training effectiveness and generalization
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams in London, Sunnyvale, and Vancouver on data architecture and strategy
• Define and implement metrics and benchmarks to assess dataset quality and model-data interactions
• Contribute to research outputs, tools, and processes that elevate data as a core lever for progress

What you’ll bring to Wayve

In order to set you up for success as a Senior Applied Scientist at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.

• 3–5 years of experience post-PhD, or equivalent experience in industry with a focus on dataset design, multi-modal learning, or pretraining
• Strong applied research track record, including publications in venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL, CVPR, or similar
• Hands-on experience curating, filtering, and scaling large datasets (vision, video, or multi-modal) for machine learning models
• Proficiency with machine learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch) and large-scale data processing (e.g., Ray, Spark, Flyte and other distributed compute infrastructure)
• Ability to design and run scientific experiments to evaluate dataset impact on model performance
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with experience working across technical and cross-functional teams
  
  
• Experience with foundation model training pipelines and data selection for large-scale pretraining
• Familiarity with multi-modal, temporal, or sensor-rich datasets (e.g., video, LiDAR, text)
• Contributions to benchmark design, data-centric evaluations, or open-source tooling for dataset experimentation

What we offer you

• Attractive compensation with salary and equity
• Immersion in a team of world-class researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs
• A unique position to shape the future of autonomy and tackle the biggest challenge of our time
• Bespoke learning and development opportunities
• Relocation support with visa sponsorship
• Flexible working hours - we trust you to do your job well, at times that suit you and your time
• Benefits such as an onsite chef, workplace nursery scheme, private health insurance, therapy, daily yoga, onsite bar, large social budgets, unlimited L&D requests, enhanced parental leave, and more!

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.

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.

DISCLAIMER: We will not ask about marriage or pregnancy, care responsibilities or disabilities in any of our job adverts or interviews. However, we do look to capture information about care responsibilities, and disabilities among other diversity information as part of an optional DEI Monitoring form to help us identify areas of improvement in our hiring process and ensure that the process is inclusive and non-discriminatory.

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