Lead Technical Program Manager, Data
About The Position
As the Lead Technical Program Manager for Data at Wayve, you will be responsible for building and leading the technical program management function for the Data organization. This includes overseeing the data platform, ingestion, standardization pipelines, and the enrichment, curation, and labeling processes that are essential for the AI Driver. The data corpus is also crucial for teams involved in simulation and validation. You will act as a delivery partner to engineering leadership for data teams, driving the department-wide objective to ensure valuable data is immediately and reliably usable. Your role involves leading significant programs yourself while also supporting and coaching a small, high-impact TPM team. Your success will be measured by improvements in data quality, throughput, cost, and the predictability of data delivery for model training. A successful TPM leader is expected to be a force multiplier, enabling teams to move faster, more effectively, and with a clear sense of purpose.
Requirements
- 8+ years in data, with deep, hands-on experience delivering data programs as a technical program manager (data platform, pipelines, enrichment/curation, labelling), including people and process leadership.
- Experience building or scaling a program function with a bias for action and ownership.
- Proven ability to build, coach, and grow high-performing teams and elevate the craft.
- Technically credible with engineers on data platforms, pipelines, and large-scale data infrastructure (experience with distributed data platforms at Petabyte scale is required).
- Experience with data ingestion from raw data to processing through different stages and pipelines.
- Understanding of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), their usage, and challenges.
- Solid understanding of Machine Learning, GPUs, and training and inference of 500M-20B parameter models.
- Proficiency with some or all of Databricks, Flyte, Ray, Kubernetes, Azure, Docker, Python.
- Proficiency with AI Agents to accelerate execution (e.g., Cursor, Claude, Codex).
- Ability to stay neutral and adapt under pressure, being effective in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and bringing structure without slowing delivery.
- Systems thinking: ability to reason about how parts of a complex data system fit together and how changes ripple through.
- Product-minded approach, focusing on outcomes and the people served by programs, prioritizing by impact and defining success.
- Exceptional cross-functional leadership, aligning and influencing across data, ML, and engineering without relying on authority.
- Ability to link data investment to measurable outcomes (quality, throughput, cost).
- Clear, data-driven communication skills, setting direction with clarity and steering with metrics.
- Growth mindset, open to feedback and continuously seeking improvement.
Nice To Haves
- Working experience with a large-scale distributed data platform used by hundreds of engineers and researchers.
- Background in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or another large-scale data / ML program.
- An engineering or computer science degree, or experience working as an engineer.
- Fluent with modern delivery tooling (e.g., Jira).
Responsibilities
- Build, coach, and grow a small TPM team; hire to fill gaps and raise the bar.
- Partner with Data leadership on planning, prioritization, and execution across the data roadmap.
- Maintain the partnership with Engineering leaders to achieve significant outcomes, encouraging teams to deliver high-leverage impact and holding leaders accountable.
- Drive flagship programs directly, including data platform, data pipelines, enrichment & curation, labeling / annotation, and dataset management and quality.
- Establish scalable practices such as planning cadences, governance, KPIs and dashboards, escalations, and operational reviews.
- Align cross-functionally with data, ML, engineering, and external data / annotation suppliers, managing dependencies, risks, and trade-offs.
- Connect delivery to outcomes and represent the data org in company-level reviews, focusing on data quality, throughput, cost, and time-to-insight.
Benefits
- Competitive equity package
- Inclusive interview experience
- Commitment to creating a diverse, fair and respectful culture
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
