Principle Engineer, 3D Reconstruction

Wayve•Sunnyvale, CA

6d•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! The Role Wayve is looking for a Principal Engineer, 3D Reconstruction to lead the development of an offline 3D reconstruction capability that builds high-quality 3D world geometry from vehicle sensor data in dynamic scenes. The system will draw on localization and mapping, state estimation, and sensor fusion to produce offline 3D geometric reconstructions and best-estimate ego motion from heterogeneous vehicle platforms and sensor suites. The work will support internal validation, data enrichment, and model development by turning raw sensor data into reliable, quality-assessed 3D ground-truth outputs. This is a principal-level technical leadership role for someone who can set the technical direction, build early prototypes, and align cross-functional teams around a shared reconstruction capability.

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.