Engineering Manager – Indexing and Search Systems

The Role

We are hiring an Engineering Manager to lead our new Indexing Team in Sunnyvale. This team owns the infrastructure and systems that make Wayve’s vast video corpus discoverable and searchable — powering downstream workflows across data mining, model training, and evaluation.

This role will be responsible for scaling our indexing stack to support vector-based, semantic, and metadata-based search over hundreds of thousands of hours of multimodal video data. The indexing system underpins core ML and curation efforts across Wayve’s autonomy stack and foundation model research.

You will initially hire and manage a team of 4 engineers and play a key role in defining technical direction, delivery rituals, and long-term org design. As the demand for index-driven workflows grows, you’ll be responsible for growing the team further in 2026, building a world-class capability around video corpus discovery and retrieval.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team focused on the design, scaling, and reliability of Wayve’s corpus indexing systems.
• Define the technical architecture for:
• Embedding-based retrieval (e.g., CLIP, internal latent spaces)
• Metadata-based querying across large-scale video + sensor datasets
• Multi-modal index structures for fast, expressive search
• Establish engineering rituals (planning, standups, retros) and team delivery rhythm.
• Work closely with ML, data curation, and simulation teams to align indexing priorities with downstream workflows.
• Ensure the indexing system meets evolving performance, recall/precision, and observability needs at scale.
• Drive hiring, onboarding, and team structure planning to support 2026+ growth.
• Collaborate with platform and infra teams to ensure efficient data access, durability, and integration with pipeline backends.

About you

In order to set you up for success as a Engineering Manager – Indexing and Search Systems at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.

Essential Skills and Experience

• 2+ years experience leading high-performing engineering teams.
• Proven track record designing and scaling distributed systems, particularly search or indexing infrastructure.
• Experience with vector similarity search, ANN algorithms, or semantic retrieval systems.
• Strong technical fluency with Python and/or systems-level languages (e.g., C++, Go); familiarity with data stack components like Spark, Ray, Databricks.
• Comfort working with ML workflows or embedding-based pipelines.
• Demonstrated ability to grow teams, drive team rituals, and lead through ambiguity.

Desirable Skills and Experience

• Experience with modern vector search frameworks (e.g., Faiss, Weaviate, Pinecone, Vespa).
• Familiarity with multimodal indexing (video + sensor + metadata).
• Background in ML platform engineering or data discovery systems.
• Prior exposure to autonomous vehicles, simulation systems, or robotics data flows.
• Understanding of active learning, dataset mining, or data curation.

This is a full-time role based in our office in Sunnyvale, California. 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.