Senior Counsel, Regulatory

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 LEGAL TEAM Our Legal team helps Wayve navigate the regulatory and commercial challenges of bringing embodied AI into real-world deployment. As our Regulatory Counsel in Japan, you’ll provide dedicated local legal support as we prepare for robotaxi deployment in Tokyo and progress our licence applications. You’ll work closely with our Policy and local operational teams. This is an opportunity to make a direct impact on how Wayve engages with Japanese regulators, manages operational legal risk and supports its partnerships in Japan. 🧠 Your day-to-day - Provide practical, commercially minded regulatory advice to our Japan team, translating complex legal requirements into clear recommendations. - Lead local engagement with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department and other regulators, representing Wayve’s position on regulatory and compliance matters. - Own the legal aspects of incident reporting, assist with police reports, and translate and interpret Japanese-language documents and outputs. - Partner with our Policy team on local relationship-building and provide on-the-ground legal support in Japan’s time zone. - Advise on Japanese corporate and commercial matters as needed, alongside your regulatory responsibilities. 🧩 What you’ll be working on - Supporting the regulatory pathway for Wayve’s robotaxi deployment in Tokyo, including our licence applications in Japan. - Developing clear, practical approaches to incident reporting and police engagement that support responsible deployment and protect Wayve’s legal position. - Helping the local team understand and navigate Japanese regulatory requirements and ways of working. - Providing Japanese legal and regulatory support for the Nissan–Wayve and Wayve–Uber relationships, including local liaison where needed. 🙌 You should apply if - You’re a Japan-qualified lawyer with around five years of relevant experience and a strong regulatory background in a regulated sector. We assess relevant experience flexibly; specialist autonomous vehicle experience is not essential. - You’re fluent in Japanese and English for legal and business communication, comfortable with Japanese business etiquette, and able to interpret Japanese legal and operational documents accurately. - You can represent Wayve confidently in police, regulatory and partner discussions, and communicate complex legal issues clearly to colleagues across the business. - You bring sound commercial judgement and offer practical, business-oriented advice rather than simply explaining the law. - You have strong legal analysis, drafting, communication and stakeholder management skills. - You’re proactive, comfortable working independently and able to prioritise multiple workstreams in a fast-moving environment. - You enjoy partnering with cross-functional teams at the intersection of technology, regulation and commercial innovation. It would also be helpful if you have: - In-house legal experience or a law firm secondment into a business. - Corporate and commercial legal experience. - Experience in automotive / OEMs, mobility or another regulated sector, such as finance, technology or online safety. - Familiarity with autonomous vehicle, AI or product safety regulatory frameworks. - Experience engaging directly with regulators, policymakers or industry bodies. 🌱 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 wor