Engineering Manager, SRE - AV Fleet

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 The Japan Fleet Reliability SRE team, part of Vehicle Software, keeps Wayve’s autonomous vehicles safe, available and ready for daily operation in Japan. The team works closely with the separate Field Engineering organisation, Fleet Operations, App SW and the wider Engineering org, and connects Japan’s real-world needs with global Vehicle Software engineering. 🧠 Your day-to-day As a hands-on Engineering Manager, you’ll lead the Japan Fleet Reliability SRE team, which is responsible for the reliability, safety and availability of our autonomous vehicle fleet. You’ll own your team’s people, roadmap and reliability outcomes, and stay close to incidents, designs, code and vehicle systems, contributing directly when the problem demands it. This is not a coordination-only role. Your impact will be measured by the outcomes of your team and systems, not by a fixed percentage of time spent coding. 🧩 What you’ll be working on: - Building, coaching and retaining a high-performing, inclusive Japan Fleet Reliability SRE team, owning hiring, performance, career development, capacity and sustainable escalation coverage. - Improving safe on-road availability, detection and recovery, repeat-incident rates, software and model rollout reliability, and data workflows, and leading the team to engineer away recurring operational toil through maintainable code, tooling and automation. - Leading high-severity engineering incidents and making sure blameless reviews produce measurable, owned and durable improvements. - Setting technical direction for observability, SLI/SLOs, production readiness, release safety, automation, remote diagnostics and fleet tooling, and taking part in design and code reviews. - Partnering 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. - Representing Japan’s priorities in global roadmaps, and communicating risks and decisions effectively with Japanese OEMs, suppliers, mobility partners and Wayve leaders. 🙌 You should apply if: Essential - Engineering-management experience with direct accountability for a software, SRE, platform, systems or similarly technical team. - A track record of leading and developing a team of approximately 5–10 engineers or similarly complex multidisciplinary groups. - Practical mastery of reliability engineering, observability, incident management, release and change safety, resilience and continuous improvement. - Strong engineering depth and current credibility in design review, debugging, automation, code review and production systems. - Experience owning roadmaps, resourcing, dependencies, technical trade-offs and measurable delivery outcomes. - Evidence of hiring, coaching, developing and managing performance while creating clarity, accountability and psychological safety. - Calm, structured judgement during incidents and the ability to communicate risk clearly to senior, technical and operational stakeholders. - Willingness to work regularly onsite in the Yokohama area and join an engineering escalation rotation. - Permission to work in Japan, or eligibility for employer-supported immigration where applicable to the final hiring plan. Desirable - Autonomous vehicles, robotics, automotive software, embedded or edge compute, safety-critical systems or large physical fleets. - Vehicle commissioning, compute or sensor integration, networking, diagnostics, data offload or over-the-air deployment. - Linux, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, telemetry pipelines, infrastructure as code and modern observability tooling. - Building internal automation or platforms in Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript or a comparable language. - Experience collaborating with Japanese automotive manufacturers, suppliers or mobility operators in a global engineering organisation. 🌱 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,