Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Emergency Trajectory Models Sunnyvale

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.

In our fast-paced environment 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

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in Wayve's AV Core organization, you will lead the technical direction and delivery of a learned emergency trajectory model for low-frequency, high-consequence maneuvers such as evasive steering and emergency braking. You will take the programme from problem definition through modelling, evaluation, integration, and evidence for deployment.

Emergency maneuvers are rare, high-consequence events that place unusual demands on data, modelling, and validation. The hard problem is not simply to train another trajectory head: it is to define the operating envelope of a specialist model, what evidence shows that it improves outcomes without introducing new failure modes, and how it integrates with the general driving model and surrounding system. You will lead that work across AV Core and with partners across simulation, evaluation, safety, and product engineering.

Key responsibilities

• Set the technical strategy and roadmap for the emergency trajectory model, including its behavioral scope, operating envelope, system interfaces, and measurable acceptance criteria.
• Design and train trajectory-generating policies using the methods best supported by evidence, including behaviour cloning, reinforcement learning, or other sequential decision‑making approaches.
• Build a data strategy for rare emergency cases, combining fleet data, targeted mining, simulation, augmentation, and reweighting while controlling coverage gaps and unintended behavior.
• Create rigorous open‑loop and closed‑loop evaluations for collision avoidance, evasive steering, emergency braking, recovery, robustness, latency, and regressions in nominal driving.
• Lead integration into the shared driving stack, align technical decisions across teams, and raise the bar through architecture reviews, mentoring, and clear communication of risks, trade‑offs, and evidence.

About you

In order to set you up for success as a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.

Essential

• A track record of staff‑level technical leadership: setting direction for ambiguous machine learning programmes, aligning multiple teams, and carrying work from research through production deployment.
• Deep expertise developing learned trajectory‑generation or policy models for embodied systems, including architecture design, objective design, training, and empirical validation.
• Hands‑on experience with behaviour cloning, reinforcement learning, or related methods, including objective design, distribution shift, robustness, and closed‑loop failure analysis.
• Strong machine learning engineering skills in Python and PyTorch, with experience building reproducible training and evaluation systems on large, heterogeneous datasets.
• Exceptional technical judgement and communication: able to make safety‑relevant trade‑offs explicit, define the evidence needed for decisions, and lead without relying on formal authority.

Desirable

• Experience applying learned models in autonomous driving or robotics, with strong understanding of motion planning, vehicle dynamics, control, or collision avoidance.
• Experience with specialist, fallback, redundant, mixture‑of‑experts, or model‑routing architectures and the interfaces used to select between them.
• Experience mining, generating, or evaluating rare events using simulation and fleet or real‑world data.
• Experience deploying learned policies under real‑time latency, reliability, and compute constraints; proficiency in C++, CUDA, or systems optimisation.
• Experience with multimodal, transformer‑based, diffusion‑based, or other generative trajectory or policy models.

This is a full‑time role based in our office in Sunnyvale. 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. The reasonably estimated salary for this role ranges from $336,400 to $370,300, plus a competitive equity package. Actual compensation is based on the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience.

Wayve is committed to creating an inclusive interview experience. If you require any accommodations or adjustments to participate fully in our interview process, please let us know.

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.

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.

For more information visit Careers at Wayve.

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

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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.