Director of Science

Job Description

Who we are

Our team is at the forefront of developing autonomous vehicles using cutting-edge technology such as deep learning, computer vision, and reinforcement learning. We are a fast-growing company with a multi-national, world-class research team working on building a better future for self-driving cars.

Our approach to building autonomous vehicles is unique, we don't believe in telling an algorithm how to drive through hand-coded rules and expensive HD maps. Instead, we believe that using experience and data will allow our algorithms to be more intelligent, capable of easily adapting to new environments.

Our goal is to be the first to deploy autonomous vehicles in 100 cities across the world, bringing autonomy to everyone, everywhere.

Where you will have an impact

We’re looking for experienced and motivated individuals to join our journey in developing next-generation autonomous vehicles.

As Director of Science, you will lead our growing London-based research science team and coordinate with stakeholders across Wayve to define our research strategy and execution to position Wayve as a world leader in AI. Our current focus areas and expertise include vision-language models, reinforcement learning, perception, generative world models of driving, safety systems, and domain adaptation, which you can read more about in our research blog. This means you will:

• Manage and lead our London-based research science team, working closely with team members to develop career plans and growth trajectories
• Work closely with our Chief Scientist, senior scientists, our Mountain View science team, and other stakeholders across Wayve to define and execute our research strategy, investments, and operating model
• Partner with the senior leadership team to maintain a culture of impact, performance, and health
• Scope for new investments once this role is in place

Challenges you will own

• Deliver major scientific breakthroughs that position Wayve as a world leader in AI
• Deliver tech transfers that take those breakthroughs into our production driving or fleet learning stack
• Build increasing strength and an internal community of scientists and scientific rigour at Wayve
• Raise our profile in the academic community through publications and collaborations

What you will bring

Essential:

• A successful track record of growing and managing a team of exceptional people
• 7+ years working in industrial research
• A strong track record of ground-breaking academic publications and significant standing in the AI community
• Experience with tech transfers of scientific advances into product that have shipped
• Comfortable with roadmap planning, stakeholder management, requirements gathering and alignment with leadership

Desirable:

• Experience working directly in some of reinforcement learning, learned robotics, large language models, vision transformers, vision and language models, computer vision, synthetic data, simulation
• Management experience of a team of 20+ research scientists
• Experience managing managers
• Track record of high profile PR success accompanying publication
• Having a significant following on social media

We understand that everyone has a unique set of skills and experiences and that you may not meet everything listed above. If you’re passionate about making a positive impact on the world and are motivated by bringing mobility to everyone, everywhere, we encourage you to apply.

What we offer you

• Partially-remote and flexible working
• Learning and development budget
• 25 days annual leave and bank holidays
• Enhanced parental leave (eligibility criteria apply)
• Workplace nursery scheme
• Competitive salary and benefits
• Opt-in private health insurance
• On-site chef
• Dog-friendly office
• Access to mental health platform/therapy
• The opportunity to shape the future of autonomous driving and tackle one of the biggest challenges of our time

At Wayve, we’re committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment. We welcome applicants of all genders, races, sexual orientations and backgrounds.

DISCLAIMER: 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.