Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Index

Wayve • Sunnyvale, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Search & Indexing team, part of Compute and Data Platform (AI Platform), makes Wayve's multimodal driving data discoverable. We build the indexing infrastructure behind vector and metadata-based retrieval, powering data curation, training set construction and ML research. You'd be the first hire in the team, in our Sunnyvale office. You'll design, build and operate the search and indexing platform for hundreds of thousands of hours of video and sensor data, with the system scaling beyond 10B vectors. You'll work with the Technical Lead on architecture, own complex components from design through production, and help decide what to build versus buy. Expect to move fast: use off-the-shelf tools and ship an MVP in months, not quarters. You'll work with ML, Data, Evaluation and Platform teams, and support other engineers through code reviews and mentoring.

Requirements

• 7+ years in backend, infrastructure or ML systems, building production systems
• Hands-on experience with vector databases or ANN technologies such as FAISS, LanceDB or similar
• Understand multimodal embeddings and have evaluated search quality across relevance, recall, filtering accuracy and performance
• Code strongly in Python or another systems language
• Built search services, APIs, and large-scale ingestion and indexing pipelines
• Delivered 0→1 systems in ambiguous problem spaces
• Comfortable working across infra, ML and data curation

Nice To Haves

• Large-scale ML pipelines or distributed data infrastructure
• Multimodal data, including video, images, sensor data and metadata
• Active learning, semantic retrieval or training-data selection workflows
• Autonomy, robotics or large-scale data infrastructure
• Evaluating technical vendors and working with external providers

Responsibilities

• Design, build and operate the search and indexing platform for hundreds of thousands of hours of video and sensor data, with the system scaling beyond 10B vectors.
• Work with the Technical Lead on architecture.
• Own complex components from design through production.
• Help decide what to build versus buy.
• Use off-the-shelf tools and ship an MVP in months, not quarters.
• Work with ML, Data, Evaluation and Platform teams.
• Support other engineers through code reviews and mentoring.
• Production search and indexing systems at billion-vector scale
• Ingestion and indexing pipelines across video, sensor data, embeddings and metadata
• Backend services and APIs for vector similarity, semantic retrieval and metadata-filtered search
• Evaluating and integrating embedding models, vector databases, ANN libraries and external vendors
• Evaluation frameworks measuring retrieval quality, recall, relevance, filtering accuracy, latency, freshness, scalability and cost
• Integrating search into training-set construction, data curation and research workflows

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: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed