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 - Own requirements, release readiness, and in-field performance and issue triage - 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 (Ownership through the full lifecycle) - Define and track quality metrics (e.g., comfort, tracking error, and safety margin KPIs, and regressions against them) - Contribute to safety artefacts: provide evidence for safety cases, work with the safety team to ensure compliance with required standards 🧩 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: REQUIRED SKILLS/EXPERIENCE - Strong fundamentals in control theory, with applied experience in one or more of optimization, model-predictive control, numerical methods or dynamical systems - Practical experience developing, tuning and validating motion control on complex real world physical systems (e.g., direct experience with mobile robotics and/or autonomous vehicles) - Experience with test and validation discipline: unit and integration tests, simulation regression suites, closed-loop metrics. - 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 DESIRED SKILLS/EXPERIENCE - Applied machine learning experience, or experience developing systems that integrate with ML components - Vehicle dynamics and actuation. Steering, braking and powertrain interfaces, actuator delay models, and CAN or similar vehicle bus experience - Experience in the automotive industry, including ADAS or vehicle controls - Experience with safety-critical systems, validation, and relevant industry standards (e.g. ISO 26262) - Experience with monitoring and diagnostics: Logging, fault detection, and on-platform debugging tools, ideally with experience investigating field issues - Experience across multiple platforms or vehicles. The team supports vehicle-to-vehicle variation, such as accounting for parameter identification, calibration, and keeping one software stack across hardware variants 🌱 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 environment