Data Science Manager

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. 🛠️ About our Engineering Teams Wayve is seeking a Data Science Manager to lead our Applied Methods Data Science team, based in the UK. The team acts as a trusted partner to the Autonomy organisation, turning experimental and observational analysis of real and simulated driving into the evaluations and insights that help engineering teams rapidly progress towards customer commitments. In this role, you will broaden the team’s impact, accelerate delivery, and scale its capability through both additional headcount and technology—helping advance Wayve’s leadership in end-to-end AI for autonomous mobility. 🧠 Your day-to-day You’ll lead a team of data scientists and work closely with stakeholders across Autonomy to balance customer needs, technical rigour, and delivery. You’ll set direction, support your team’s growth, and build the relationships needed to keep the team close to its customers and ahead of future support needs. 🧩 What you’ll be working on: - Set and align priorities with stakeholders across Autonomy, maintaining provisional three-, six-, and 12-month roadmaps that balance customer demand with team capacity. - Work with technical leads and senior engineers to review technical proposals and designs, maintaining a high bar for statistical rigour and evaluation fidelity. - Monitor delivery status and cadence, surface schedule risks early, and manage trade-offs with customers. - Grow the team by hiring and onboarding data scientists, while investing in tooling and automation that enable the team to scale beyond headcount alone. - Guide career-growth conversations, matching business needs with development opportunities and building progression pathways. - Build cross-functional relationships that keep the team close to its customers and anticipate where support will be needed. 🙌 You should apply if: - You have three or more years’ experience managing a team of five or more individual contributors. - You have a track record of growing and maintaining high-performing teams. - You have a strong data science foundation, including experience applying causal-inference methods in experimental or observational settings. - You have built strong working relationships with cross-functional stakeholders and customers, translating their needs into clear team priorities. - You have experience setting technical direction and reviewing designs and proposals from senior engineers. - You are comfortable planning and communicating roadmaps, and managing delivery and expectations with demanding customers. - You are comfortable working asynchronously across time zones with cross-functional partners. - You are deeply curious about building something new and excited to help define AV2.0 and how Wayve builds it. It would also be great if you have experience building or scaling an applied or embedded data science function; simulation, offline evaluation, or measurement for machine-learning systems; practical machine-learning experience, such as PyTorch; or taking research ideas into production. Experience with statistical rigour and experimental best practice, large datasets and distributed computing such as Spark or Hadoop, or fast-moving technology companies and startups is also valuable. 🌱 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. More about Wayve: 🚀 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 at scale. Instead 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. We believe autonomy represents a once in a generation transformation in how people and goods move, comparable to the shift from horses to cars, and from human driven vehicles to intelligent machines. 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 plus through to L4 as our core AI model scales. In a race increasingly defined by intelligence and real world learning, Wayve is taking a distinct approach, building a generalisable driving intelligence that can power any vehicle, anywhe