Controls Engineer

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 Robotics Team The Robotics team is responsible for bridging the gap from our model to our vehicle platforms, in order to let the model focus on making driving decisions. We aim to provide high quality data to the model for making such decisions, whilst abstracting away platform-specific aspects. We combine specialisms across the robotics domain, blending strong theoretical foundations with solid engineering practice to span the spectrum from research to production. 🧠 Your day-to-day - Develop, integrate, tune, and validate control, trajectory-generation, and action-processing algorithms across different vehicle platforms, operating modes, and challenging driving conditions, ensuring robust real-world performance - Maintain and evolve our controls software architecture that connects AI Driver outputs to real-time vehicle actuation and feedback - Implement and maintain production-quality, latency-sensitive control software in C++ for deployment to prototype, reference and production vehicles - Use simulation, closed-loop evaluation and on-road testing to characterize controller behaviour, diagnose performance issues and validate improvements - Work with teams across Wayve to define controller interfaces, integrate with adjacent systems and enable new vehicle platforms and product features 🧩 What you’ll be working on: In this role you will develop and improve the vehicle trajectory and motion controllers that translate the Wayve AI Driver outputs into safe, smooth and robust vehicle motion across different vehicle platforms and applications (both ADAS and AV). You’ll tackle cutting-edge challenges: developing principled controls approaches, implementing real time systems, testing in complex scenarios and refining our evaluation pipelines. This is a great chance to make an impact on the AV industry and grow alongside a focused team of passionate experts at the forefront of autonomous driving technology. 🙌 You should apply if you have: - Strong fundamentals in control theory, with depth in one or more of optimization, model-predictive control, numerical methods or dynamical systems - Practical experience developing, tuning and validating control or motion systems on real world physical systems - Strong software engineering skills, with experience building reliable production-quality systems in C++ - Experience with latency-sensitive or real-time software - Ability to reason about and debug system-level behaviour in complex robotic systems across software and hardware - Applied experience with model predictive control, trajectory optimization, motion planning etc. - Direct experience with mobile robotics or autonomous vehicle systems - Experience in the automotive industry, including ADAS or vehicle controls - Experience with safety-critical systems, validation, and relevant industry standards (e.g. ISO 26262) - Applied machine learning experience, or experience developing systems that integrate with ML components - 🌱 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, anywhere. By combining embodied AI with scalable deployment, we are creating technology that can be shaped to each OEM brand and driver experience, accelerating the transition to a safer, more intelligent future of mobility. How we wo