Lead Technical Program Manager, Data

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 Program Management Team Wayve’s Program Management team turns complex technical goals into coordinated delivery. Working closely with engineering, research and product teams, we align priorities, manage dependencies and bring clarity to ambiguous challenges. We combine technical depth with cross-functional leadership to help teams move faster, more effectively and with purpose—focusing on meaningful outcomes rather than process for its own sake. As part of this team, you’ll build and lead the technical programme management function supporting our Data organisation. You’ll partner with Data and Engineering leadership to make valuable data immediately and reliably usable, combining hands-on ownership of flagship programmes with coaching and developing a small, high-impact TPM team. 🧠 Your day-to-day - Coach and support a small, high-impact TPM team, helping people develop their skills, work through challenges and raise the standard of programme delivery. - Act as a trusted delivery partner to Data and Engineering leadership, aligning priorities, challenging trade-offs and holding teams and leaders accountable for meaningful outcomes. - Work across data, ML, engineering and external data and annotation suppliers to manage dependencies, surface risks and remove blockers. - Use KPIs, dashboards and operational reviews to understand delivery progress, identify bottlenecks and steer decisions with the right data. - Represent the Data organisation in company-level reviews, communicating progress, risks and decisions clearly and connecting delivery to business impact. 🧩 What you’ll be working on: - Building and scaling the technical programme management function for our Data organisation, hiring to fill capability gaps and growing a high-performing team. - Owning planning, prioritisation and execution across the data roadmap in partnership with Data leadership. - Leading flagship programmes directly across the data platform, ingestion and standardisation pipelines, enrichment and curation, labelling and annotation, and dataset management and quality. - Establishing scalable planning cadences, governance, escalation paths and operational practices that bring structure without slowing delivery. - Driving measurable improvements in data quality, throughput, cost and time-to-insight, making the data that powers our models more reliably and predictably available. 🙌 You should apply if: - You bring 8+ years of deep, hands-on experience delivering data programmes as a technical programme manager, spanning data platforms, pipelines, enrichment, curation or labelling. You’ve built or scaled a programme function, led people and processes, and get things done with ownership and a bias for action. - You build, coach and grow high-performing teams. You know how to develop people, hire to strengthen the team and raise the bar on technical programme management. - You have strong technical depth across data platforms, pipelines and large-scale distributed infrastructure, including platforms operating at petabyte scale. You can engage credibly with engineers without being expected to write production code. Your experience includes: - Data ingestion from raw data through multiple processing stages and pipelines, with an understanding of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), their uses and their challenges. - A solid understanding of machine learning, GPUs, and training and inference for models with 500 million to 20 billion parameters. - Proficiency with some or all of Databricks, Flyte, Ray, Kubernetes, Azure, Docker and Python. - Proficiency with AI agents such as Cursor, Claude or Codex to accelerate execution. - You stay objective under pressure and adapt your approach in ambiguous, fast-moving environments. You bring structure and clarity without creating unnecessary process or slowing delivery. - You think in systems, understanding how the parts of a complex data platform fit together and how changes in one area affect others. - You’re product-minded, focusing on the people your programmes serve, prioritising by impact and defining what good looks like—not just tracking activity. - You align and influence across data, ML and engineering without relying on formal authority. - You connect data investment to measurable outcomes, including quality, throughput and cost, and communicate direction and progress clearly using the right metrics. - You’re open to feedback and continuously improve how you and your team work. - Ideally, you’ve worked with large-scale distributed data platforms used by hundreds of engineers and researc