Engineering Manager, Runtime Platform, Robot Software
- Your hands-on technical skills and knack for understanding systems make you excellent at profiling and optimization.
- You're calm under pressure and can troubleshoot real-time systems issues effectively.
- You're practical and efficient, focusing on what works without getting lost in theory.
- You can work independently and solve complex technical problems with minimal supervision.
- You dislike extensive people management and may find coaching and 1:1s draining.
- You might avoid the strategic and cross-functional influence aspects of the role.
- Your preference for flexibility could clash with the need for structured roadmaps and accountability.
- You may underinvest in team culture and career development.
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.
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!
About The Team
Wayve is building embodied AI that can drive any vehicle, anywhere. Our AI Driver runs on-vehicle in real time, and the Runtime Platform team owns the application frameworks, middleware (IPC / inter-process communication), monitoring, performance, and observability foundations that make that possible. This is a growing sub-team that we're breaking out into its own team, and you’ll be the Engineering Manager to lead it.
The role
As Engineering Manager for Runtime Platform, you'll lead a single team and be accountable for its delivery, engagement, resourcing, roadmap, and performance. People leadership is your first priority: you'll coach and grow the team, keep it engaged and high-performing, and own hiring as the team stands up. You'll pair that with strong technical judgment — setting clear technical direction on latency, profiling, real-time scheduling, and middleware, and owning the outcome of the team's technical decisions.
What you'll do
- Lead and grow the team (first priority): keep the team engaged, developing, and performing with good morale; run 1:1s, set clear expectations, give regular high-quality feedback, manage performance, and support career growth against our career framework.
- Hire and build the team: own hiring and onboarding to get the right people in the right roles, and shape the team's culture and ways of working as it forms.
- Drive execution: ensure the team's work advances company goals; staff committed programs, keep the roadmap aligned to available resources, prioritize, and hold the team accountable for delivery, quality, and operational reliability.
- Set technical direction: ensure the team has a clear, holistic technical direction and clear ownership of its technology-roadmap milestones — working closely with the team's tech lead(s) and stakeholders; own the outcome of the team's technical decisions.
- Own the runtime foundations: guide the team's work across system design, application frameworks, the middleware/IPC layer, performance & optimization, and measurement & observability. Enable new vehicle platform enablement with incremental work and minimal performance degradation. Implement and maintain strong CI, HIL, and internal quality gates to provide a robust framework for fast iteration..
- Collaborate and unblock: cascade the roadmap, partner with internal Vehicle Software teams, model developers, hardware, and OEM programs. Act as the point of escalation for your team, and proactively surface and resolve risks and dependencies.
What you'll bring
- Engineering management experience (essential): a track record of leading, growing, engaging, and retaining a high-performing software/systems team — including hiring, coaching, feedback, and performance management. People management is your first priority.
- Delivery through a team: experience owning a team's roadmap and shipping through others — planning, prioritization, resourcing, and accountability for quality and operational reliability.
- Technical credibility: hands-on depth in what takes to architect and deliver embedded software shipped on a product to real customers. Demonstrate knowledge of high-performance, low-latency embedded software (C++) to earn the trust of senior systems engineers and own the team's technical decisions. You don't need to be the team's top individual contributor.
- Performance & systems fundamentals: solid understanding of profiling, benchmarking, latency/throughput/memory-bandwidth analysis, and real-time scheduling, on embedded Linux (ideally also QNX).
- IPC / middleware: a strong grasp of middleware for high-throughput real-time or robotics systems and the trade-offs across vendors and platforms.
- Cross-functional leadership: the ability to set direction and deliver through influence across many stakeholder teams.
Nice to have
- Experience in automotive, robotics, or another safety-relevant real-time domain.
- Familiarity with profiling toolchains (pprof/gperftools, perf, Nsight, NVLumo) and observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Datadog).
- Experience with NVIDIA (Orin/Thor) and/or Qualcomm compute platforms.
- Experience with a micro-kernel and/or real-time OS (e.g. QNX) is a plus.
Why this team
The Runtime Platform team supports Wayve's on-vehicle stack — other on-board components rely on the frameworks, performance, observability, and layers it owns. You'll lead a team whose work contributes to how Wayve scales its AI Driver to new vehicles, OEM programs, and other embodiments.
This is a full-time role based in our office in London. 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.
Best personality fits for this role
Your natural leadership and drive to achieve goals make you excellent at owning the team's roadmap and ensuring delivery.
Read the ENTJ career guide →Your strategic mindset helps you define and stick to long-term technical roadmaps for the runtime platform.
Read the INTJ career guide →Your deep curiosity about systems and how things work makes you great at analyzing middleware, profiling, and performance optimization.
Read the INTP career guide →