Principal Validation Tech Lead​/Manager, L4 Driverless Autonomy

Before the detail, here's the challenge you'd help us solve.

We build the embodied intelligence that moves real vehicles safely, and the ecosystem a billion machines will run on in the future. Very few people in AI can say this. Every role here, whatever the team, plugs into that.

Here’s what this particular role covers.

Wayve’s engineering teams are building the AI, robotics, simulation, data, and systems foundations needed to deploy a generalisable AI Driver safely and at scale.

The AI Validation team builds trust in the Wayve AI Driver. We create the strategies, metrics, test suites, and evidence used to assess learned driving behaviour across simulation and real‑world testing, supporting product releases and customer programmes.

• Lead validation strategy for advanced driver‑assistance and autonomous‑driving functions across multiple test modalities.

• Translate product and safety requirements into measurable coverage, acceptance criteria, and validation plans.

• Work hands‑on with Python‑based evaluation tools, metrics, simulation results, and large datasets.

• Analyse validation outcomes and communicate clear evidence to Product, Safety, Release, and Autonomy Engineering stakeholders.

• Coordinate dependencies across data, simulation, evaluation, and engineering teams so validation can run reliably at scale.

• Provide technical leadership and raise the quality bar for systems validation in ambiguous, fast‑moving programmes.

• Comprehensive verification strategies for ADAS and autonomy functions within the Wayve AI Driver.

• Test suites spanning simulated scenarios and physical vehicle testing.

• Behaviour metrics and evidence that connect system requirements to real driving performance.

• Scalable, automated validation workflows that support multiple products and customer deployments.

• Validation approaches for learned and adaptive behaviours as end‑to‑end AI systems evolve.

• You have significant experience validating complex automotive, autonomous‑driving, robotics, aerospace, or similarly safety‑relevant systems.

• You have led validation concepts from initial ambiguity through implementation, execution, and reporting.

• You can use Python to implement metrics and work within evaluation codebases; SQL experience is valuable.

• You understand simulated and physical testing and can make evidence‑based decisions from imperfect data.

• You communicate crisply, document decisions well, and can align technical stakeholders across disciplines.

• Experience with ML, computer vision, motion planning, data science, SOTIF, safety validation, or agentic AI workflows is beneficial.

Not ticking every box? That’s totally okay! If you’re passionate about autonomy and keen to learn, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement.

Wayve is building the leading AI platform for autonomous driving. We are pioneering an end‑to‑end AI approach that enables vehicles to learn directly from real‑world experience, developing the ability to adapt, generalise and improve tead of relying on hand‑coded rules or pre‑mapped environments, our AI Driver learns to drive by understanding the world around it. The result is technology that navigates complex urban environments with intelligence, precision and natural flow, unlocking meaningful advances in both safety and efficiency.

Our ambition is to make autonomy universal. Wayve’s mapless and hardware‑agnostic AI platform integrates with global OEM partners, enabling continuous software evolution and unlocking advanced levels of automation from L2+ through to L4 as our core AI model scales.

Our main hubs are in London, Sunnyvale,…