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.
In our fast-paced environment big problems ignite us—we embrace uncertainty, leaning into complex challenges to unlock groundbreaking solutions. We aim high and stay humble in our pursuit of excellence, constantly learning and evolving as we 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; we back each other to deliver impact.
Make Wayve the experience that defines your career!
The Role
Wayve is looking for a Principal Engineer, 3D Reconstruction to lead the development of an offline 3D reconstruction capability that builds high-quality 3D world geometry from vehicle sensor data in dynamic scenes. The system will draw on localization and mapping, state estimation, and sensor fusion to produce offline 3D geometric reconstructions and best-estimate ego motion from heterogeneous vehicle platforms and sensor suites. The work will support internal validation, data enrichment, and model development by turning raw sensor data into reliable, quality-assessed 3D ground-truth outputs. This is a principal-level technical leadership role for someone who can set the technical direction, build early prototypes, and align cross-functional teams around a shared reconstruction capability.
Key Responsibilities
- Define the technical architecture and roadmap for Wayve’s offline 3D reconstruction system.
- Lead the development of MVPs that unblock high-priority internal use cases, while guiding the transition to a robust internal platform.
- Establish the core technical interfaces, output representations, and tools needed to support internal customers.
- Partner with calibration, sensor fusion, perception, data, infrastructure, and validation teams to align requirements, resources and ownership boundaries.
- Set technical standards for reconstruction quality, failure analysis, uncertainty measurement, and dataset suitability and execute strategies to validate them
- Mentor and provide technical leadership to engineers contributing to the 3D reconstruction effort.
- Communicate technical tradeoffs, limitations, and progress clearly to engineering leaders and cross-functional stakeholders.
Required Skills/Experience
- Deep technical expertise in SLAM, 3D reconstruction, mapping, state estimation, or closely related robotics/perception fields.
- Strong hands-on experience with lidar-based reconstruction, point-cloud registration, pose estimation, and real-world robotics sensor data.
- Experience building offline reconstruction, mapping, or perception systems that operate on large volumes of sensor data.
- Strong software engineering skills in C++, Python, or similar robotics/perception environments.
- Experience taking research or prototype algorithms into reliable production systems.
- Comfortable defining technical strategy, roadmaps, and milestones in ambiguous problem spaces
- Strong cross-functional technical leadership in ambiguous, multi-team environments.
- Clear communication of algorithmic tradeoffs, limitations, confidence, and failure modes to technical and cross functional stakeholders.
- Systems-level understanding of sensor calibration, timing, synchronization and quality issues, and ability to define requirements and work with specialist teams to achieve them
Desired Skills/Experience
- MS/PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, State Estimation, Sensor Fusion, SLAM, 3D Reconstruction, or a related technical field; or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, mapping, or ground-truth data pipelines in a production setting.
- Experience with GNSS/INS fusion, sensor based odometry, or other high-accuracy position estimation approaches
- Experience with nonlinear optimization techniques such as pose graph optimization, factor graphs, bundle adjustment, ICP etc
- Experience apply modern machine learning approaches to 3D reconstruction, mapping, or scene understanding, including foundation models or learned 3D representations
- Familiarity with robotics tooling such as ROS, PCL, OpenCV, CUDA, or similar.
- Familiarity with ML data enrichment, autolabelling, annotation workflows, or validation-data generation.
- Experience designing quality metrics, validation evidence, or credibility arguments for reconstructed data.
- Experience leading small expert technical teams from early-stage concept to production use.
This role is a full-time role based 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. We operate core working hours so you can determine the schedule that works best for you and your team.
Wayve is committed to creating an inclusive interview experience. If you require any accommodations or adjustments to participate fully in our interview process, please let us know.
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.
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.
For more information visit Careers at Wayve.
To learn more about what drives us, visit Values at Wayve
For US candidates only, please visit E-Verify Notice and Participation and Right to Work
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.
Skills Required
- Deep technical expertise in SLAM, 3D reconstruction, mapping, state estimation, or related robotics/perception fields.
- Hands-on experience with lidar-based reconstruction, point-cloud registration, pose estimation, and real-world robotics sensor data.
- Experience building offline reconstruction, mapping, or perception systems that operate on large volumes of sensor data.
- Strong software engineering skills in C++, Python, or similar robotics/perception environments.
- Experience taking research or prototype algorithms into reliable production systems.
- Ability to define technical strategy, roadmaps, and milestones in ambiguous problem spaces.
- Cross-functional technical leadership in ambiguous, multi-team environments.
- Clear communication of algorithmic tradeoffs, limitations, confidence, and failure modes to stakeholders.
- Systems-level understanding of sensor calibration, timing, synchronization, and quality issues.
- MS/PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, mapping, or ground-truth data pipelines in production.
- Experience with GNSS/INS fusion, sensor-based odometry, or other high-accuracy position estimation approaches.
- Experience with nonlinear optimization techniques (pose graph optimization, factor graphs, bundle adjustment, ICP).
- Experience applying modern machine learning approaches to 3D reconstruction, mapping, or scene understanding.
- Familiarity with robotics tooling such as ROS, PCL, OpenCV, CUDA, or similar.
- Familiarity with ML data enrichment, autolabelling, annotation workflows, or validation-data generation.
- Experience designing quality metrics, validation evidence, or credibility arguments for reconstructed data.
- Experience leading small expert technical teams from early-stage concept to production use.
Wayve Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Wayve and has not been reviewed or approved by Wayve.
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Healthcare Strength — Private healthcare and access to therapy via Spill are part of the standard package. This indicates robust health support within the core offering.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Paid vacation, public holidays, and additional leave programs are explicitly listed. This breadth of time away supports work–life balance expectations.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Cash plus equity is standard in offers at this growth stage. This provides ownership alongside salary with perceived upside tied to company momentum.
Wayve Insights
What We Do
We're Wayve, a leading developer of embodied intelligence for autonomous vehicles. We use AI to pioneer a next-generation approach to self-driving: AV2.0, which enables fleet operators to unlock the benefits of AV technology at scale. Founded in 2017, Wayve is made up of a diverse team of experts in machine learning and robotics. We were the first to deploy AVs on public roads with end-to-end deep learning. Today, our teams are based in London and California, and we're testing AVs in cities across the UK. Inspired by our vision for a smarter, safer, more sustainable world, we're looking for people who are passionate about building breakthrough solutions to some of the world’s most important challenges. If you're looking for an exciting opportunity with a dynamic team, get in touch!
