Tech Lead - Pretraining Team, Wayve Foundation Model

The role

This is a rare opportunity to lead foundational work at the intersection of large-scale pretraining and embodied AI. You’ll shape how Wayve curates and experiments with data to pretrain the next generation of multi-modal foundation models for autonomy. Working at the frontier of a still-undefined field, you’ll collaborate with research and engineering teams to define what “good data” looks like for embodied systems — and work with engineering teams to build the infrastructure to scale it. Your work will directly influence the performance, generalization, and capabilities of Wayve’s AI stack.

Key responsibilities:

• Lead data curation, enrichment, and filtering efforts for large-scale pretraining of embodied models
• Build and manage distributed data processing and ingestion pipelines across modalities
• Partner with research teams to run data-centric experiments and influence model training strategy
• Identify, integrate, and leverage third-party datasets to enhance pretraining and evaluation
• Manage and mentor a team of engineers and data scientists to deliver scientific and technical impact

What you’ll bring to Wayve

In order to set you up for success as a Tech Lead / Tech Lead Manager at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience:

Essential

• Leadership in data-centric AI: Experience leading research or engineering teams focused on dataset curation, filtering, or enrichment at scale, particularly for large-scale model pretraining.
• Contributions to data benchmarks or tools: Involvement in projects like DataComp, LAION, DINO, MOLMO, or equivalent initiatives that define or evaluate pretraining dataset quality.
• Deep understanding of distributed data processing: Strong working knowledge of frameworks such as Ray, Spark, Dask, or equivalent, and designing scalable, fault-tolerant data pipelines.
• Hands-on deep learning expertise: Strong proficiency in PyTorch and a solid grasp of how data quality, distribution, and structure impact training dynamics and model generalisation.
• Experimental mindset: Demonstrated ability to run and interpret data-centric experiments (e.g., small-scale trials, ablations) to inform large-scale model training.
• Collaboration with research: Experience working closely with ML researchers and contributing to experimental design, pretraining strategies, or evaluation design.
• Minimum 5 years of relevant industry experience: Including at least several years in data-heavy, model-driven environments involving deep learning at scale.
  
  

Nice to have

• Track record of research impact: Publications in top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, CoRL, or equivalent, especially in data-centric learning, representation learning, or self-supervised learning.
• People management experience: Track record managing ~5 direct reports in a research or research-leaning engineering environment; skilled in team development, prioritization, and technical alignment.
• Experience with multi-modal or embodied systems: Familiarity with datasets involving video, language, lidar, radar and generally sensor fusion or embodied perception and control.
• Tooling and infrastructure know-how: Familiarity with modern data versioning, annotation, and orchestration tools (e.g., Weights & Biases, ClearML, Labelbox, Airflow, Metaflow, etc.).
• Autonomous systems exposure: While prior AV or robotics experience is not required, a demonstrated interest in embodied intelligence or real-world agent learning is a plus.
• Systems thinking and data-product intuition: Ability to reason about upstream data decisions and their downstream effects on models, infrastructure, and product goals.

What we offer you

• Attractive compensation with salary and equity
• Immersion in a team of world-class researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs
• A unique position to shape the future of autonomy and tackle the biggest challenge of our time
• Bespoke learning and development opportunities
• Relocation support with visa sponsorship
• Flexible working hours - we trust you to do your job well, at times that suit you and your time
• Benefits such as an onsite chef, workplace nursery scheme, private health insurance, therapy, daily yoga, onsite bar, large social budgets, unlimited L&D requests, enhanced parental leave, and more!

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.