Director, Data Platform

Wayve•Sunnyvale, CA

About The Position

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 Wayve is hiring a Director of Data Platform to define and deliver the strategy for our next-generation ML data platform. This is a critical leadership role at an inflection point for the company. As our models, datasets, and training systems scale rapidly, you will own how data is managed, governed, and leveraged as a core competitive advantage—while maintaining strong cost discipline across our cloud estate. You will set the vision and execution roadmap for a scalable, high-performance, and cost-efficient data platform that underpins ML training, inference, safety, and validation across a multi-region, multi-cloud environment.

Requirements

Experience leading large-scale ML data platform or data infrastructure teams.
Deep expertise in distributed data systems, storage, and governance.
Strong understanding of ML workflows and their data dependencies.
Track record delivering production-grade data platforms at scale.
Experience optimising cloud infrastructure for cost and performance.
Ability to translate strategy into clear execution plans.
Strong leadership, hiring, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience with multi-cloud and multi-region data architectures.
Background in autonomous systems, robotics, or safety-critical ML.
Experience with vector search, dataset discovery, or data curation systems.
Familiarity with large-scale, heterogeneous data ingestion (e.g. sensor/OEM data).
Experience scaling infrastructure in fast-growing, research-driven companies.

Responsibilities

Define and execute the ML data platform strategy, balancing scalability, performance, and cost.
Establish a multi-cloud, multi-region data strategy aligned to compute, data locality, and resilience.
Own data governance, lifecycle, and retention policies to control corpus growth and spend.
Architect efficient storage and access patterns to support high-throughput data pipelines.
Lead data ingestion across multiple OEM sources and heterogeneous formats.
Build capabilities in data mining, semantic/vector search, and dataset curation.
Oversee data materialisation and loading pipelines for training and inference efficiency.
Improve data quality, usability, and semantic consistency at scale.
Drive visibility and accountability for data platform cost.
Build and lead a high-performing data platform team.