Technical Program Manager Director, Driver Out

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. DIRECTOR OF TECHNICAL PROGRAM MANAGEMENT, DRIVER OUT 🛠️ About our Program Management Team Wayve’s Program Management team turns complex technical goals into coordinated delivery. Working closely with engineering, research, product, safety and operations 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 Director of Technical Program Management for Driver Out, you’ll own the multi-year programme that takes Wayve’s autonomy technology from its first eyes-off, driver-out demonstration to a productised service on public roads. While robotaxi pilots prove the product in different markets, Driver Out establishes the underlying safety, systems and delivery foundations. You’ll lead this organisation-wide effort, build the TPM team supporting it and work directly with senior leaders and external partners to make driver-out safely and predictably achievable. 🧠 Your day-to-day - Partner with engineering, science, safety, product and operations leaders, alongside external partners including OEMs and Uber, to align on scope, sequencing and readiness. - Drive the programme’s critical path, turning complex technical, safety and operational requirements into clear commitments, and managing dependencies, risks and trade-offs across workstreams. - Coach and support your TPM team, set clear expectations, manage performance and hold workstream leads accountable for delivery. - Run milestone and launch-readiness reviews, using KPIs and dashboards to assess progress, surface issues and drive timely decisions, escalations and risk-budget management. - Represent Driver Out to the executive team, communicating progress, risk and readiness clearly and guiding the programme’s most consequential decisions. 🧩 What you’ll be working on: - Owning the Driver Out programme end-to-end, defining and delivering the multi-year plan from the first driver-out demonstration through public-road product integration and initial scaling, connecting concept to operation. - Coordinating delivery across driving-model performance and safety, system architecture, verification and validation, vehicle hardware and software, remote assistance and operations. - Bringing together the safety case, behaviour validation, functional safety (ISO 26262), SOTIF (ISO 21448), cybersecurity and the Safety Management System into a credible, signed-off safety argument for driver-out. - Building and growing the programme’s TPM organisation, developing other leaders and establishing the operating model, governance and delivery practices needed to lead a programme of this scale. - Connecting Driver Out delivery to Wayve’s commercial path to market, making strategic trade-offs that keep the transition from driver-in to driver-out safe, achievable and aligned with product outcomes. 🙌 You should apply if: - You have 10+ years of experience delivering complex technical programmes, including director-level leadership. You’ve owned large, multi-year, cross-organisation programmes end-to-end and bring deep ownership and a bias for action. - You’ve built and led programme-management teams, with direct responsibility for coaching, development and performance management. You grow high-performing teams and other leaders, and establish effective processes that raise the standard of delivery. - You bring extensive experience delivering autonomous-vehicle or comparable safety-critical robotics programmes, ideally progressing towards driver-out or L4 operation. You understand the systems, safety and operational realities involved. - You’re fluent in safety cases, behaviour validation, functional safety (ISO 26262), SOTIF (ISO 21448) and safety management systems, and can bring these together into a coherent safety argument across multiple workstreams. - You’re technically strong across autonomy, machine learning, vehicle hardware and software, and systems engineering. You can engage credibly with engineers and scientists without being expected to write production code, and understand how changes in one part of a safety-critical system affect the others. - You align and influence engineering, science, safety, product, operations and external partners at the most senior levels, building shared ownership without relying on formal authority. - You stay objective under pressure and adapt your approach in ambiguous, high-stakes environments, bringing structure and clarity without slowing delivery