Vice President, AI Data

Wayve • Sunnyvale, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Wayve is the leading developer of Embodied AI technology, founded in 2017. Our advanced AI software and foundation models enable vehicles to perceive, understand, and navigate any complex environment, enhancing the usability and safety of automated driving systems. Our vision is to create autonomy that propels the world forward. Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic AI products are designed for automakers, accelerating the transition from assisted to automated driving. We are looking for a VP of Data to lead the data strategy behind our autonomous driving technology. This is a senior engineering leadership role with end-to-end ownership of how Wayve uses data to improve our AI. You will determine what data we need, how we acquire it, how we understand and enrich it, and ultimately how we turn it into measurable improvements in model performance. The scale and shape of the problem is unique. Our data comes from our own vehicles, OEM programmes, partners and external sources, spanning different vehicles, sensors, markets and driving environments. Within that corpus, the most valuable examples are often the hardest to find: rare behaviours, unusual interactions, safety-critical events and the long tail of real-world driving. Your job is not simply to build the systems that process this data. It is to decide what data matters and why, and build the strategy, organisation and learning loop that allows Wayve to learn from it faster. You will lead Wayve’s Data organisation and provide senior ownership for data within Engineering, partnering closely across AI, Science, Validation, Product, Compute and our commercial teams.

Requirements

• Significant engineering leadership experience, with a track record of building and leading high-performing technical organisations.
• Deep technical expertise in computer vision, video, multimodal AI or related perception problems.
• Experience leading large-scale data capabilities that directly influence model training, evaluation and performance.
• Strong intuition for what makes data valuable, with experience in data discovery, selection, curation and enrichment at scale.
• Strong technical and commercial judgement, including making trade-offs across quality, speed, cost, scale and build-versus-partner decisions.
• Ability to move between strategy and technical detail, set direction in ambiguity, and influence effectively across senior technical and business stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

• Autonomous driving, robotics or embodied AI.
• Large-scale video, multimodal or foundation model training.
• Semantic search, embeddings, active learning, auto-labelling or other approaches to intelligent data selection and enrichment.
• Large-scale real-world data acquisition across fleets, customers, partners or multiple geographies.

Responsibilities

• Own Wayve’s data strategy: Set the strategy across the complete AI learning cycle, determining what data we need and how it should drive model performance, from foundation model training through specialised driving capabilities and production programmes.
• Build the data flywheel: Own the learning loop from real-world signals and model behaviour through data discovery, curation and enrichment into training, evaluation, deployment and measurement.
• Find the data that matters: Develop intelligent approaches to discovering rare, surprising and safety-critical scenarios within extremely large datasets, using techniques such as embeddings, semantic search, learned representations and model-driven data selection.
• Lead data acquisition and enrichment: Define how Wayve collects, buys, generates and enriches data across our own fleet, OEM programmes, partners and external sources, balancing coverage, quality, speed and economics.
• Connect data investment to model performance: Establish how we measure the value of data and make rigorous trade-offs across quality, accuracy, speed, cost and scale, ensuring investment is focused where it creates the greatest impact.
• Scale our data strategy globally: Build an approach that supports multiple OEMs, vehicle platforms, sensor configurations, geographies and regulatory environments while maintaining a scalable global architecture.
• Build and lead the organisation: Lead and develop a high-performing, multidisciplinary Data organisation, partnering closely with AI, Science, Validation, Product, Compute, Finance and Commercial teams.

Benefits

• Wayve is committed to creating an inclusive interview experience. If you require any accommodations or adjustments to participate fully in our interview process, please let us know.
• At Wayve we're committed 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: Executive
• Education Level: No Education Listed