Tech Lead, Autonomy Performance - Robotaxi

The role

This is a high-impact technical leadership role and a key founding member position at the centre of Wayve’s Robotaxi launch, providing a unique opportunity to set direction and definition for the autonomy performance function.

We are specifically looking for product-oriented engineers who will own the autonomy performance bar that determines whether the product is ready for the public and stays great release over release. You’ll turn messy real-world driving signals into trusted metrics, a prioritised funnel of issues, and cross-team execution that lands measurable improvements in production.

This is an opportunity to define “performance” for an end-to-end learned driving system where traditional AV playbooks don’t translate cleanly, with visibility and influence across the teams shaping the stack. This is primarily hands-on IC, with a clear growth path and expectation to transition into leading a small team as the Robotaxi program scales.

Key responsibilities:

• Own and evolve the autonomy performance measurement framework for Robotaxi (driving + pick-up / drop-off), including the metrics, dashboards, and narrative used by leadership to make ship/no-ship decisions
• Build and run the end-to-end performance improvement loop: detect issues, triage and prioritise, drive root-cause investigations, and ensure fixes land across model, robot software, backend, and evaluation tooling
• Lead cross-functional execution across AV core, evaluation/validation, robotics, robot software, triage/systems, and SRE—often without direct reporting authority—aligning roadmaps to performance outcomes
• Define and enforce performance release gates and regression detection for production deployments; own readiness calls, post-release monitoring, and follow-through on incidents/regressions
• Be hands-on in the data and code when needed (Python/C++/SQL) to accelerate debugging, validate hypotheses, and unblock delivery

About you

In order to set you up for success as a Tech Lead within the robotaxi team here at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.

Essential

• Demonstrated cross-functional engineering leadership: you’ve led complex delivery across multiple teams and stakeholders to achieve production outcomes (without relying on direct line management)
• Strong product and customer orientation; able to connect technical performance metrics to rider experience, operational outcomes, and launch readiness
• Strong autonomy/robotics performance debugging experience, including deep hands-on work with real-world issues and time-series / real-time signals (not just managing a queue)
• Strong technical foundations in learned systems / ML-driven robotics: you can reason about model behaviour, failure modes, and measurement pitfalls in data-driven autonomy stacks
• Production fluency in Python, C++ and SQL, with the ability to work directly in code and analytics pipelines to diagnose problems and validate improvements

Desirable

• Experience owning or co-owning releases to a fleet of robots/vehicles in production, including defining release processes, gates, rollback plans, and regression handling
• Familiarity with modern data/observability stacks used in autonomy programs (e.g., Databricks/SQL, Grafana, internal eval/sim tooling, dashboarding/reporting)
• Track record of building scalable triage systems and performance programs (metrics taxonomy, prioritisation frameworks, quality bars) in safety- or mission-critical environments

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