Head of AI - Research Manager

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 unite 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

Science is the team that is advancing our end-to-end autonomous driving research. The team’s mission is to accelerate our journey to AV2.0 and ensure the future success of Wayve by incubating and investing in new ideas that have the potential to become game-changing technological advances for the company.

As the first Research Manager in our Vancouver office, you will be responsible for managing & scaling a strong Science team in collaboration with other Wayve science teams in London and Mountain View. You will provide coaching and guidance to each of the researchers and engineers within your team and work with leaders across the company to ensure sustainable career growth for your team during a period of growth in the company. You will participate in our project-based operating model where your focus will be unlocking the potential of your team and its technical leaders to drive industry-leading impact. As part of your work, you will help identify the right projects to invest in, ensure the right allocation of resources to those projects, keep the team in good health, provide technical feedback to your team, share progress to build momentum, and build alignment and strong collaboration across the wider Science organisation. We are actively hiring and aim to substantially grow our research team over the next two years and you will be at the heart of this.

Challenges you will own

• Work closely with team members to develop career plans and growth trajectories based on each individual’s strengths and weaknesses and their own aspirations.
• Work closely with project leads to ensure team members are having strong impact and are set up for success.
• Work closely with project leads and Science leadership to ensure projects are resourced in a way that balances the needs of the business with the needs of the individuals.
• Offer coaching and technical mentorship to direct reports (especially project leads).
• Bring technical & project management expertise and experience to help accelerate our progress and decision-making.
• Challenge the status quo (both technical and organisational/process).
• Prioritize effectively and keep processes lean and effective.
• Partner with leadership to maintain a culture of cross-boundary collaboration, impact, innovation, and health.
• Grow the team as a hiring manager, to bring in complementary, diverse skill sets and backgrounds. Anticipate the needs of the business 6-24 months out, identify areas where additional resources are needed or we need to grow new domain expertise, and pitch this to leadership for investment.
• Contribute to the day-to-day running of the Science team’s operations and larger collaborative efforts.
  
  

Day-to-Day

• 1:1s across the team reporting updates or coaching through career hurdles
• Ensure project leads within your team are aligning projects with company goals and priorities
• Encourage bold ambition and risk-taking in projects
• Work cross-functionally with company leaders to set the broader strategy and roadmap
• Sit down with researchers and engineers to review upcoming decisions and assess any dependencies or risks
• Organise reading groups and other scientific learning activities
• Debug teams and projects - ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, think creatively, eliminate possible factors that could be contributing to a bug, add feedback loops, and then assess feedback
• Work with leadership to communicate progress, blockers, and potential accelerants
• Assess general team health and look for opportunities to improve processes and best practices
• Ensure strong research engineering practice across the team that balances scientific agility with strong engineering
• Contribute to outreach efforts at the office, conferences, etc.
  
  

What you will bring to Wayve

Essential:

• Prior experience as a manager of research teams (10-15+ people) with a clear career interest towards management
• Passionate about fostering personal and professional growth in individual team members
• Experience with roadmap planning, stakeholder management, requirements gathering and alignment with peers towards milestones and deliverables
• Strong knowledge of Machine Learning and related areas, such as Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, etc.
• Industry experience with machine learning technology development which has had real-world product impact
• Experience driving a team and technical project through the full lifecycle, ideally within the language, vision or multimodal space
• Passionate about bringing research concepts through to product
• Research and engineering fundamentals
• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or similar experience
  
  

Desirable:

• Experience managing the execution of a technical product
• Good experience working in a project-based (“matrix”) operating environment
• Proven track record of successfully delivering research projects and publications
• Experience working with robotics, self-driving, AR/VR, or LLMs
  
  

This is our ideal candidate, but by no means the only candidate; we all have different strengths. If you don’t match 100% but believe you could do the job well, we would love to hear from you.

What we offer you

• Competitive compensation, learning & development, daily lunches, lots of fun socials, comprehensive private health insurance and more!
• Immersion in a team of world-class researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs.
• A position to shape the future of embodied AI, and thus bring about a real-world deployment of a breakthrough technology.
• Help relocating to Vancouver, with visa sponsorship.
• Flexible working hours - we trust you to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.
  
  

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.

This is a full-time role based in our office in Vancouver. 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.

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.