Data Platform Engineer

Staff Data Platform Engineer

We are looking for a Staff Data Platform Engineer to own and lead Wayve’s Data Transfer Hub project. This mission‑critical infrastructure will scale to transfer petabytes of sensor data per day from partner‑operated vehicles around the world. This is a hands‑on technical leadership role driving a new project ’ll design and build a globally distributed hub‑and‑spoke ingestion system, working directly with data partners like Uber and Nissan.

Your infrastructure is what makes Wayve’s AI model training possible at scale.

• Set technical direction for the Data Transfer Hub, making trade‑offs across reliability, throughput, cost, partner constraints, observability and operational support.
• Lead the technical design and delivery of the Data Transfer Hub project, ingesting large volumes of video, LiDAR and sensor data from global partners at up to PB/day scale.
• Design and build parallelised, distributed data transfer pipelines using Flyte for workflow orchestration, Kafka/event‑driven patterns for lifecycle tracing, and Azure for storage and transfer infrastructure.
• Build and operate a globally distributed hub‑and‑spoke data transfer model to retrieve and share sensor data at scale with partners.
• Write infrastructure‑as‑code in Terraform; build pipeline logic primarily in Python.
• Drive cloud‑to‑cloud and cross‑cloud networking solutions (Azure primary; cross‑cloud experience beneficial).
• Work in a fast‑changing environment; requirements will evolve; high comfort with ambiguity required.

• Proven experience building and operating large‑scale data transfer pipelines at multi‑TB or PB scale.
• Experience orchestrating parallelised transfer jobs:
  Flyte preferred; other workflow orchestration tools (e.g. Airflow, Prefect) will be considered.
• Experience building reliable, observable data systems, including retry strategies, backfills, data integrity checks, lifecycle/state tracking and operational alerting.
• Strong cloud platform skills (Azure preferred); experience with multiple cloud providers (AWS/GCP) is a strong advantage.
• Proficiency in Python and Terraform.
• Cloud‑to‑cloud and networking experience (e.g. blob/object transfer and storage at scale, cross‑cloud data movement).
• A product mindset: you think about the customer and build solutions that fix real problems, not just implement requirements.
• Comfort working in a fast‑changing environment with evolving requirements: this is a startup within a scale‑up.
• High degree of autonomy and ownership: you take responsibility for outcomes, not just tasks.

• Experience with Kafka for event‑driven transfer observability.
• Multi‑cloud experience across Azure, AWS and/or GCP.
• Experience working directly with external data partners.
• Background in autonomous vehicles, robotics or similar data‑intensive domains.

Full‑time role based in our office in London. We operate a hybrid working policy that combines time together in our offices and workshops with time spent working from home. Core working hours are flexible to accommodate you and your team.

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.

We will not ask about marriage or pregnancy, care responsibilities or disabilities in any of our job adverts or interviews. However, we do look to capture information about care responsibilities, and disabilities among other diversity information as part of an optional DEI Monitoring form to help us identify areas of improvement in our hiring process and ensure that the process is inclusive and non‑discriminatory.