Engineering Manager, SRE – AV Fleet, Japan

Job description

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. THE ROLE Wayve is looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead the Japan team responsible for the reliability, safety and availability of our autonomous vehicle fleet. You will lead the Japan Fleet Reliability SRE team, collaborate closely with the separate Field Engineering organisation, own your team’s people, roadmap and reliability outcomes, and connect Japan’s real-world needs with global Vehicle Software engineering. This is not a coordination-only role: you will stay close to incidents, designs, code and vehicle systems while building an organisation that can scale beyond any individual. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Build, coach and retain a high-performing, inclusive Japan Fleet Reliability SRE team with clear ownership and sustainable escalation coverage. - Maximise safe on-road time by improving fleet health, incident response, release reliability and operational readiness. - Turn recurring vehicle and software failure modes into durable engineering improvements, automation and measurable reliability targets. - Create a scalable operating model for new vehicle platforms, Gen 3 capabilities and future commercial fleet growth in Japan. - Represent Japan’s operational needs in global engineering priorities while bringing global standards and lessons back into local operations. WHAT YOU WILL DO LEAD AND DEVELOP THE TEAM - Own team engagement, performance, hiring, onboarding, development and retention; set clear expectations and provide timely, high-quality feedback. - Coach SREs through regular one-to-ones, growth plans and career conversations, addressing performance gaps early and fairly. - Plan team capacity and skills against the roadmap, assign the right people to the highest-value problems and maintain a sustainable on-call and support model. - Create psychological safety while holding a high bar for engineering quality, operational discipline, ownership and follow-through. - Lead the team through organisational, technical and programme change with clarity, empathy and decisiveness. OWN RELIABLE AND SAFE FLEET OPERATIONS - Be the accountable engineering escalation point for Japan fleet reliability, including high-severity incidents and operational risks. - Establish clear incident command, escalation and communication practices across Fleet Operations, Vehicle Safety Operators and engineering teams. - Improve detection, diagnosis and recovery for failures across vehicle compute, sensors, power, networking, software deployment, model delivery, data capture and offload workflows. - Ensure post-incident reviews are blameless, evidence-based and converted into owned corrective actions, preventive controls and reusable playbooks. - Maintain healthy on-call rotations, effective runbooks and clear handoffs across Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. RAISE OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE AND RELIABILITY ENGINEERING - Define and evolve service-level indicators, service-level objectives and error budgets for the fleet’s most important operational workflows. - Use fleet health, availability, incident, change-failure, recovery-time, data-quality and toil metrics to identify priorities and demonstrate improvement. - Set technical direction for observability, SLI/SLOs, production readiness, release safety, automation, remote diagnostics and fleet tooling; participate directly in design and code reviews and challenge failure assumptions. - Embed production-readiness, observability, safe change management, release validation and rollback expectations into systems used by the Japan fleet. - Balance immediate operational needs with technical debt reduction and long-term resilience. DELIVER JAPAN PROGRAMMES PREDICTABLY - Translate company and programme goals into a clear Japan Fleet Reliability roadmap, milestones, staffing plan, dependencies and measurable outcomes. - Partner with Vehicle Software, Fleet Operations, Field Engineering, VSI/Platform Integration, Vehicle Generalization, safety, infrastructure and programme teams to move new vehicles and capabilities into stable operations. - Drive operational readiness for new vehicle variants and capabilities, including commissioning, validation, release rollout, field support and handover into steady-state operations. - Identify technical, people and schedule risks early; make trade-offs explicit, escalate appropriately and keep stakeholders informed without creating unnecessary process. - Build strong, respectful relationships with Japanese OEMs, suppliers and operational partners where the role requires engineering coordination. BUILD SCALABLE TOOLING AND AUTOMATION -