Principal Roboticist, Robot Foundation Model

Wayve • Sunnyvale, CA

5d • Onsite

About The Position

Wayve is seeking a Principal Roboticist to join the Multi-Embodiment Generalist Agent (MEGA) team as a founding member. This 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. This is a senior, high-impact role with significant ownership, where you will help define the research agenda, technical strategy, and foundations of a new robotics program. You will collaborate with world-class researchers in foundation models, embodied intelligence, and large-scale machine learning. The role involves working across the entire robot stack, including selecting, building, and maintaining robot hardware, developing software for deployment and testing, and working closely 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 behavior in the physical world. You will work closely 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, combining 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.

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

• Inclusive interview experience
• Accommodations or adjustments to participate fully in our interview process
• Commitment to creating a diverse, fair and respectful culture that is inclusive of everyone based on their unique skills and perspectives, and regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law.

What This Job Offers

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