Senior Software Engineer - Driving Features

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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.

The role

As a Senior Software Engineer in the Driving Features team, you’ll play a central role in developing and scaling the feature logic and software systems that define how our AV behaves and feels on the road. From configurable driving modes and personalization to high-level planning and policy behavior, you’ll work across the autonomy stack to prototype, build, and ship user-facing features that integrate tightly with onboard execution and upstream ML systems. Your work will directly impact how our vehicles express driving intent — safely, smoothly, and predictably.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement software features across the AV stack, including behavior modules, policy integration, inference management, and runtime config systems — with emphasis on testability, performance, and iteration speed
• Develop infrastructure to support configurable features, enabling rapid experimentation of driving modes, user preferences, and personalized behaviors
• Own and evolve our software architecture (architecture-agnostic, but familiar with ROS 2, iceoryx, CAN, networking, inference) to support high-risk, high-upside experiments.
• Interface with control, and ML teams to define clear interfaces and protocols between feature logic, low-level execution, and learning-based components
• Expose and maintain Python bindings (pybind11, pyo3/maturin) or other glue layers to help collaboration and rapid scripting.
• Support the deployment and evaluation of new features across structured testing, on-road experimentation, and dev fleet rollout, with strong attention to instrumentation and observability
• Contribute to best practices in safety validation, configuration management, and system behavior traceability for feature-driven autonomy

About you

You are outcome-focused, highly pragmatic, and thrive in dynamic environments. You understand how to break down complex autonomy behaviors into modular, testable, and deployable systems — and you care about how features perform on real roads, not just in theory.

Essential

• Strong software engineering skills in C and Python
• Experience building and scaling feature logic, policy modules, or configuration-driven systems in robotics or AV applications
• Familiarity with onboard runtime environments, including inference, orchestration, and data logging
• Proven track record of delivering features from prototype to on-road validation
• Strong systems thinking, able to reason about full-stack interactions from user-facing logic to vehicle actuation
• Experience working with tools like Bazel, Docker, and real-time debug environments
• Comfortable balancing speed and safety in environments with real-world feedback and evolving requirements

Desirable

• Familiarity with ROS 2, CAN bus, and onboard telemetry frameworks
• Experience creating user-configurable features in AV, robotics, or embedded systems
• Experience with structured testing, ML evaluation loops, or offline-to-online experimentation
• Understanding of hybrid systems (ML rule-based logic) and behavior arbitration
• Experience creating Python bindings for C or Rust libraries (pybind11, pyo3/maturin) with a focus in user experience and performance.

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 Sunnyvale or London, UK. 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.