Applied Scientist, Multi-Modal Pre-training Team

At Wayve we're committed to creating a diverse, fair and respectful culture that is inclusive of everyone based on their unique skills and perspectives, and regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law.

About us

Founded in 2017, Wayve is the leading developer of Embodied AI technology. Our advanced AI software and foundation models enable vehicles to perceive, understand, and navigate any complex environment, enhancing the usability and safety of automated driving systems.

Our vision is to create autonomy that propels the world forward. Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic AI products are designed for automakers, accelerating the transition from assisted to automated driving.

At Wayve, big problems ignite us—we embrace uncertainty, leaning into complex challenges to unlock groundbreaking solutions. We aim high and stay humble in our pursuit of excellence, constantly learning and evolving as we pave the way for a smarter, safer future.

At Wayve, your contributions matter. We value diversity, embrace new perspectives, and foster an inclusive work environment; we back each other to deliver impact.

Make Wayve the experience that defines your career!

The role

We are currently looking for people with research expertise in AI applied to autonomous driving or similar robotics or decision making domain, inclusive, but not limited to the following specific areas:

• Foundation models for robotics
• Model-free and model-based reinforcement learning
• Offline reinforcement learning
• Large language models
• Planning with learned models, model predictive control and tree search
• Imitation learning, inverse reinforcement learning and causal inference
• Learned agent models: behavioural and physical models of cars, people, and other dynamic agents

You'll be working on some of the world's hardest problems, and able to attack them in new ways. You'll be a key member of our diverse, cross-disciplinary team, helping teach our robots how to drive safely and comfortably in complex real-world environments. This encompasses many aspects of research across perception, prediction, planning, and control, including:

• How to leverage our large, rich, and diverse sources of real-world driving data
• How to architect our models to best employ the latest advances in foundation models, transformers, world models, etc.
• Which learning algorithms to use (e.g. reinforcement learning, behavioural cloning)
• How to leverage simulation for controlled experimental insight, training data augmentation, and re-simulation
• How to scale models efficiently across data, model size, and compute, while maintaining efficient deployment on the car

You also have the potential to contribute to academic publications for top-tier conferences like NeurIPS, CVPR, ICRA, ICLR, CoRL etc. working in a world-class team to achieve this.

About you

In order to set you up for success as a Applied Scientist at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.

• Thorough knowledge of and 5+ years applied experience in AI research, computer vision, deep learning, reinforcement learning or robotics
• Ability to deliver high quality code and familiarity with deep learning frameworks (Python and Pytorch preferred)
• Experience leading a research agenda aligned with larger goals
• Industrial and / or academic experience in deep learning, software engineering, automotive or robotics
• Experience working with training data, metrics, visualisation tools, and in-depth analysis of results
• Ability to understand, author and critique cutting-edge research papers
• Familiarity with code-reviewing, C++, Linux, Git is a plus
• PhD in a relevant area and / or track records of delivering value through machine learning are a big plus.

This is a full-time role based in our office in Sunnyvale, CA. At Wayve we want the best of all worlds so we operate a hybrid working policy that combines time together in our offices and workshops to fuel innovation, culture, relationships and learning, and time spent working from home. We operate core working hours so you can determine the schedule that works best for you and your team.

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We understand that everyone has a unique set of skills and experiences and that not everyone will meet all of the requirements listed above. If you’re passionate about self-driving cars and think you have what it takes to make a positive impact on the world, we encourage you to apply.

For more information visit Careers at Wayve.

To learn more about what drives us, visit Values at Wayve

DISCLAIMER: We will not ask about marriage or pregnancy, care responsibilities or disabilities in any of our job adverts or interviews. However, we do look to capture information about care responsibilities, and disabilities among other diversity information as part of an optional DEI Monitoring form to help us identify areas of improvement in our hiring process and ensure that the process is inclusive and non-discriminatory.