Applied Scientist

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.  Join our world-class team as we tackle today's most complex challenges and 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.   Make Wayve the experience that defines your career!  

Where you will have an impact 

We are seeking an experienced researcher to be a founding member of our Vancouver team! We are prioritising someone with experience actively participating in AI  projects applied to autonomous driving or similar robotics or decision-making domains, inclusive, but not limited to the following specific areas:

• Foundation models for robotics or embodied AI
• Model-free and model-based reinforcement learning
• Offline reinforcement learning
• Large language models
• Planning with learned models, model predictive control and tree search
• Imitation learning, inverse reinforcement learning and causal inference
• Learned agent models: behavioural and physical models of cars, people, and other dynamic agents

Challenges you will own

You'll be working on some of the world's hardest problems, and able to attack them in new ways.  You'll be a key member of our diverse, cross-disciplinary team, helping teach our robots how to drive safely and comfortably in complex real-world environments.  This encompasses many aspects of research across perception, prediction, planning, and control, including:

• How to leverage our large, rich, and diverse sources of real-world driving data
• How to architect our models to best employ the latest advances in foundation models, transformers, world models, etc, evaluating and incorporating state-of-the-art techniques into our workflows.
• Which learning algorithms to use (e.g. reinforcement learning, behavioural cloning)
• How to leverage simulation for controlled experimental insight, training data augmentation, and re-simulation
• How to scale models efficiently across data, model size, and compute, while maintaining efficient deployment on the car
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate research findings into scalable, production-level solutions.
• You also have the potential to contribute to academic publications for top-tier conferences like NeurIPS, CVPR, ICRA, ICLR, CoRL etc. working in a world-class team, contributing to the scientific community and establishing Wayve as a leader in the field.

What you will bring to Wayve

Essential

• Proven track record of research in one or more of the topics above demonstrated through deployed applications or publications.
• Strong programming skills in Python, with experience in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, numpy, pandas, etc.
• Experience bringing a machine learning research concept through the full ML development cycle
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently as well as in a team environment.
• Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced, innovative, interdisciplinary team environment.

Desirable:

• Experience bringing an ML research concept through to production and at scale
• PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field

What we offer you

• The chance to be part of a truly mission driven organisation and an opportunity to shape the future of autonomous driving.  Unlike our competitors, Wayve is still relatively small and nimble, giving you the chance to make a huge impact
• Competitive compensation and benefits
• A dynamic and fast-paced work environment in which you will grow every day - learning on the job, from the brightest minds in our space, and with support for more formal learning opportunities too
• A culture that is ego-free, respectful and welcoming
• 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 also operate core working hours so you can be where you need to be for family and loved ones too. Teams determine the routines that work best for them

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.   

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.