Principal Engineer, Model Development Platform

Wayve • Sunnyvale, CA

6d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Model Development Platform team builds the infrastructure and tooling behind Wayve's AI model lifecycle, from data ingestion and training to experiment scheduling and on-road testing. Our work spans AI research, large-scale distributed systems and robotic operations, and lets researchers and engineers iterate fast and deploy autonomous driving models safely.

Requirements

• 10+ years designing and building large-scale distributed systems, ML/AI infrastructure, full-stack web applications or developer platforms, including at least 3 years as a staff or principal-level engineer
• Designed systems spanning web platforms, ML pipelines and large-scale compute orchestration (e.g. Spark, Ray, Kubernetes, Airflow, MLflow)
• Driven platform reliability improvements, defined SLAs/SLOs, and built self-healing, observable systems that run at "four nines" availability or better
• Understand distributed computing, workflow orchestration, data modelling and API design in depth, and can write and review production-quality code
• Communicate well across functions and can guide engineers, managers and researchers toward a unified technical direction
• Mentored engineers across levels and built a culture of engineering excellence

Nice To Haves

• Experience applying algorithmic or mathematical optimisation (e.g. linear programming, graph algorithms) to operational or scheduling problems
• Familiarity with end-to-end model lifecycle tooling, from data ingestion and training CI to model artifact tracking and evaluation workflows
• Prior exposure to autonomous systems, robotics or other safety-critical domains
• Experience with modern web frameworks (e.g. React, Flask, FastAPI) and how they integrate with backend systems
• Understanding of data privacy, compliance and secure handling practices for large-scale sensor data

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end architecture of the platform and keep it reliable, scalable and coherent.
• Partner with the Head of Model Dev Platform to set and execute the technical vision, aligning infrastructure and tooling with company goals.
• Lead by example, going deep across web applications, distributed compute, ML Ops, data pipelines and optimisation algorithms.
• Through architecture and mentorship, help teams build platform capabilities that measurably speed up model development and fleet learning.
• Design and evolve the platform's architecture for reliability, observability and scalability.
• Set performance, latency and availability targets, and drive the engineering standards to meet them.
• Unify the platform across front-end UIs, distributed training, Spark data pipelines and optimisation-based experiment scheduling.
• Take on the hardest problems across subteams, leading architectural reviews and proposing pragmatic solutions.
• Build systems that optimise how models are tested in simulation and on-road, using techniques like linear programming and heuristic optimisation.
• Architect pipelines that ingest, transform and enrich petabytes of fleet sensor data.
• Drive efficient compute use across GPU, CPU, cloud and edge for prototyping and large-scale training.
• Work with Product, Research and Operations to align architecture with user needs.
• Co-own the platform's long-term roadmap.

Benefits

• Salaries benchmarked against the market annually
• Meaningful equity, sharing in the ownership and long term success of Wayve
• Relocation support and visa sponsorship where applicable
• Hybrid working, core hours and the chance to work hands on in vehicle workshops and labs
• Learning and development budgets with support for training, conferences and growth
• Comprehensive benefits including health insurance, dental, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, retirement or pension where applicable, access to therapists, wellbeing partnerships, team socials and more

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed