Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Index

Wayve • Sunnyvale, CA

22h • Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Machine Learning Engineer will be the first hire on Wayve’s Search & Indexing team, part of the Compute and Data Platform (AI Platform), based in the Sunnyvale office. The team makes Wayve’s multimodal driving data discoverable through indexing infrastructure for vector and metadata-based retrieval, supporting data curation, training-set construction, and ML research.

The role involves designing, building, and operating a search and indexing platform for hundreds of thousands of hours of video and sensor data, with a system intended to scale beyond 10 billion vectors. Working with the Technical Lead, the engineer will contribute to architecture, own complex components from design through production, and help determine what to build versus buy. The role emphasizes moving quickly, using off-the-shelf tools where suitable, and delivering an MVP in months rather than quarters.

The engineer will collaborate with ML, Data, Evaluation, and Platform teams, and support other engineers through code reviews and mentoring. Wayve describes its working model as hybrid, combining in-person collaboration in office spaces with remote work.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or ML systems, building production systems.
• Hands-on experience with vector databases or approximate nearest-neighbor technologies such as FAISS, LanceDB, or similar.
• Understanding of multimodal embeddings and experience evaluating search quality across relevance, recall, filtering accuracy, and performance.
• Strong coding skills in Python or another systems language.
• Experience building search services, APIs, and large-scale ingestion and indexing pipelines.
• Experience delivering 0-to-1 systems in ambiguous problem spaces.
• Comfort working across infrastructure, ML, and data curation.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with large-scale ML pipelines or distributed data infrastructure.
• Experience with multimodal data, including video, images, sensor data, and metadata.
• Experience with active learning, semantic retrieval, or training-data selection workflows.
• Experience in autonomy, robotics, or large-scale data infrastructure.
• Experience evaluating technical vendors and working with external providers.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate production search and indexing systems at billion-vector scale.
• Build ingestion and indexing pipelines for video, sensor data, embeddings, and metadata.
• Develop backend services and APIs for vector similarity, semantic retrieval, and metadata-filtered search.
• Evaluate and integrate embedding models, vector databases, approximate nearest-neighbor libraries, and external vendors.
• Develop evaluation frameworks for retrieval quality, recall, relevance, filtering accuracy, latency, freshness, scalability, and cost.
• Integrate search into training-set construction, data curation, and research workflows.
• Work with the Technical Lead on architecture and decisions about what to build versus buy.
• Own complex components from design through production and deliver an MVP quickly.
• Collaborate with ML, Data, Evaluation, and Platform teams.
• Support other engineers through code reviews and mentoring.

Benefits

• Market-benchmarked salaries, reviewed annually.
• Meaningful equity.
• Relocation support and visa sponsorship where applicable.
• Hybrid working and core hours.
• Opportunity 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 coverage, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, retirement or pension where applicable, access to therapists, wellbeing partnerships, and team socials.

What This Job Offers

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