Principle Engineer, 3D Construction

Wayve • Sunnyvale, CA

7d • Hybrid

About The Position

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!

Requirements

• Deep technical expertise in SLAM, 3D reconstruction, mapping, state estimation, or closely related robotics/perception fields.
• Strong hands-on experience with lidar-based reconstruction, point-cloud registration, pose estimation, and real-world robotics sensor data.
• Experience building offline reconstruction, mapping, or perception systems that operate on large volumes of sensor data.
• Strong software engineering skills in C++, Python, or similar robotics/perception environments.
• Experience taking research or prototype algorithms into reliable production systems.
• Comfortable defining technical strategy, roadmaps, and milestones in ambiguous problem spaces
• Strong cross-functional technical leadership in ambiguous, multi-team environments.
• Clear communication of algorithmic tradeoffs, limitations, confidence, and failure modes to technical and cross functional stakeholders.
• Systems-level understanding of sensor calibration, timing, synchronization and quality issues, and ability to define requirements and work with specialist teams to achieve them

Nice To Haves

• MS/PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, State Estimation, Sensor Fusion, SLAM, 3D Reconstruction, or a related technical field; or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, mapping, or ground-truth data pipelines in a production setting.
• Experience with GNSS/INS fusion, sensor based odometry, or other high-accuracy position estimation approaches
• Experience with nonlinear optimization techniques such as pose graph optimization, factor graphs, bundle adjustment, ICP etc
• Experience apply modern machine learning approaches to 3D reconstruction, mapping, or scene understanding, including foundation models or learned 3D representations
• Familiarity with robotics tooling such as ROS, PCL, OpenCV, CUDA, or similar.
• Familiarity with ML data enrichment, autolabelling, annotation workflows, or validation-data generation.
• Experience designing quality metrics, validation evidence, or credibility arguments for reconstructed data.
• Experience leading small expert technical teams from early-stage concept to production use.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical architecture and roadmap for Wayve’s offline 3D reconstruction system.
• Lead the development of MVPs that unblock high-priority internal use cases, while guiding the transition to a robust internal platform.
• Establish the core technical interfaces, output representations, and tools needed to support internal customers.
• Partner with calibration, sensor fusion, perception, data, infrastructure, and validation teams to align requirements, resources and ownership boundaries.
• Set technical standards for reconstruction quality, failure analysis, uncertainty measurement, and dataset suitability and execute strategies to validate them
• Mentor and provide technical leadership to engineers contributing to the 3D reconstruction effort.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs, limitations, and progress clearly to engineering leaders and cross-functional stakeholders.

Benefits

• 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.
• core working hours so you can determine the schedule that works best for you and your team.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal