Engineering Manager, Runtime Platform, Robot Software

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. ENGINEERING MANAGER, RUNTIME PLATFORM, ROBOT SOFTWARE London, UK or Sunnyvale, CA 🛠️ ABOUT OUR ENGINEERING TEAMS Wayve is building embodied AI that can drive any vehicle, anywhere. Our AI Driver operates onboard the vehicle in real time, supported by the application frameworks, middleware, performance capabilities and observability foundations owned by the Runtime Platform team. This growing function is becoming a dedicated team, and you’ll be the Engineering Manager responsible for leading it. Other onboard components depend on the frameworks, inter-process communication layers, monitoring and performance capabilities your team delivers. The team’s work is central to scaling Wayve’s AI Driver across new vehicles, OEM programes and other embodiments. 🧠 YOUR DAY-TO-DAY You’ll lead a single team and be accountable for its delivery, engagement, resourcing, roadmap and performance. People leadership will be your first priority: you’ll coach and develop engineers, maintain a healthy and high-performing team, and lead hiring and onboarding as the team grows. You’ll combine this with strong technical judgement, establishing direction across latency, profiling, real-time scheduling, middleware and observability. Working closely with technical leads and stakeholders, you’ll own the outcomes of the team’s technical decisions and ensure its roadmap supports Wayve’s broader goals. You’ll also act as the team’s escalation point, proactively identifying and resolving risks, dependencies and delivery challenges. 🧩 WHAT YOU’LL BE WORKING ON - Leading and developing the team: Run effective one-to-ones, set clear expectations, provide regular high-quality feedback, manage performance and support career development against Wayve’s career framework - Hiring and building the team: Own hiring and onboarding, ensure the right people are in the right roles, and shape the team’s culture and ways of working - Driving execution: Staff committed programmes, align the roadmap with available resources, prioritise effectively and hold the team accountable for delivery, quality and operational reliability - Setting technical direction: Establish a clear, holistic direction and ownership of technology-roadmap milestones in partnership with technical leads and stakeholders - Owning runtime foundations: Guide the team’s work across system design, application frameworks, middleware and IPC, performance optimisation, measurement and observability - Enabling new vehicle platforms: Support additional vehicle platforms through incremental development while minimizing performance degradation - Strengthening quality and iteration: Implement and maintain strong continuous integration, hardware-in-the-loop testing and internal quality gates - Collaborating across Wayve: Partner with Vehicle Software, model development, hardware and OEM programe teams - Unblocking delivery: Cascade the roadmap, surface risks and dependencies early, and act as the team’s point of escalation 🙌 YOU SHOULD APPLY IF - You have a strong track record of leading, growing, engaging and retaining a high-performing software or systems team - You have experience hiring, coaching, providing feedback, managing performance and supporting engineers’ career development - You have owned a team roadmap and delivered through others, including planning, prioritisation, resourcing and accountability for quality and operational reliability - You have hands-on experience architecting and delivering embedded software shipped in a physical product to real customers - You understand high-performance, low-latency embedded software developed in C++ and can earn the trust of senior systems engineers without needing to be the team’s top individual contributor - You understand profiling, benchmarking, latency, throughput, memory-bandwidth analysis and real-time scheduling on embedded Linux - You have a strong understanding of middleware used in high-throughput, real-time or robotics systems, including the trade-offs across vendors and platforms - You can establish direction and deliver through influence across multiple stakeholder teams The following experience would be useful but is not required: - Automotive, robotics or another safety-relevant, real-time domain - QNX, a microkernel architecture or another real-time operating system - Profiling tools such as pprof/gperftools, perf, Nsight or NVLumo - Observability platforms such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana or Datadog - NVIDIA Orin or Thor compute platforms - Qualcomm compute platforms 🌱 Not ticking every box? That’s totally okay. If you’re passionate about