Principal Roboticist, Robot Foundation Model

Wayve • Sunnyvale, CA

6d • Onsite

About The Position

The role is for a Principal Roboticist to join the Multi-Embodiment Generalist Agent (MEGA) team at Wayve Labs as a founding member. The MEGA team is focused on building foundation models for general-purpose robots beyond self-driving vehicles, aiming to create intelligent agents capable of perceiving, reasoning, moving, and manipulating the physical world across diverse embodiments like mobile manipulators, dual-arm platforms, and humanoids. This is a senior, high-impact role with 0→1 ownership, where the individual will help define the research agenda, technical strategy, and foundations of a new robotics program. The role involves working across the entire robot stack, including selecting, building, integrating, and maintaining robot hardware; developing software for robot policy deployment and testing; and collaborating with research teams on data collection, model evaluation, and the learning loop. The goal is to produce compelling, publishable research and translate it into systems demonstrating general, robust, and useful physical world behavior. The position requires close collaboration with researchers, ML engineers, roboticists, and hardware teams to rapidly advance ambitious ideas from research hypotheses to large-scale experiments and real-world capabilities. This is a unique opportunity to build a general robotics effort from the ground up, merging frontier foundation-model research with the complexities of embodied intelligence in real machines.

Requirements

• Experience in robot manipulation; working with robot hardware.
• Experience leading robotics efforts.
• Strong programming experience in C++ and/or Python.
• Experience with robot software systems such as control, planning, ROS, or ROS2.
• Experience in Machine Learning is welcome, in particular training and deploying learned robot policies.
• A track record of high-quality research or engineering work in robotics, embodied AI, or related areas.
• PhD preferred; Master's degree with equivalent experience also welcome.
• 5+ years of relevant industry experience.

Nice To Haves

• Publications in top-tier conferences such as ICRA, CoRL, or IROS are highly valued.
• Enjoy working hands-on with real robots and are comfortable debugging across hardware, software, and ML systems.
• Ability to move between research exploration and pragmatic engineering execution.
• Strong judgment around experiment design, data quality, and model evaluation.
• Clear communication across research, engineering, and product teams.
• Excited by 0→1 ownership and ambiguity in a fast-moving research environment.

Responsibilities

• Build, integrate, and maintain robot hardware platforms for research and experimentation.
• Develop and maintain robot software in C++ and Python, including control, planning, ROS/ROS2-based systems, and deployment infrastructure.
• Create infrastructure for policy deployment, data collection, evaluation, and the robotics data flywheel.
• Run real-world robot experiments and define data collection pilots that inform model development.
• Collaborate with research teams on robot policy development, model evaluation, and data strategy.
• Debug and troubleshoot robotic software, hardware, and policy failures.
• Build robust deployment, regression, and validation tests for robot systems.
• Help shape technical direction across robotics, ML, hardware, and experimentation.

Benefits

• Be part of a new, well-resourced initiative at the intersection of foundation models and robotics.
• Work on generalist robot models and help build the systems that allow them to learn from real-world interaction.
• Operate at serious scale with real robots, real data, and meaningful technical challenges.
• Influence the full stack from ML research to hardware, deployment, and evaluation.
• Join a research environment with space to innovate, publish, and define the future of embodied AI.

What This Job Offers

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