Tech Lead, Behaviour Optimisation London, United Kingdom

Wayve Technologies Ltd.; London; On-site; GBP 85,000 - 115,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI technology company in London seeks a Tech Lead for the Behaviour Optimisation team. You will design learning algorithms to enhance the decision-making of AI agents in autonomous vehicles. Ideal candidates have over 5 years of experience in applied ML/AI and a proven track record in significant technical contributions. Strong Python skills required. This role offers a chance to be at the forefront of embodied AI, shaping the future of automated driving.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in applied ML/AI roles.
• Experience in multimodal learning, reinforcement learning, or generative models.
• Strong Python and PyTorch engineering fundamentals.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve models for efficient, robust autonomy.
• Lead the design and implementation of learning algorithms.
• Contribute directly to key system components and experiments.

Skills

Applied ML/AI experience

Hands-on contributions

Multimodal learning

Reinforcement learning

Generative models

Strong Python and PyTorch skills

Tools

PyTorch

ML infrastructure

Job description

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.

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

The Science organisation at Wayve advances foundational research in embodied AI — building learning systems that can understand, act, and adapt in the real world through interaction. Within Science, the Behaviour Optimisation team focuses on one of the most intricate and impactful challenges in this space: learning robust, generalisable, and personalised behaviours for real-world agents.

Our mission is to develop learning algorithms that enable our AI driver to act with intelligence and intent — grounded in perception, driven by experience, and adaptable to new contexts. We work at the intersection of reinforcement learning, generative modelling, behaviour cloning, and latent action inference, with a focus on sample efficiency, uncertainty awareness, and interpretability.

We're not just optimising for metrics — we’re shaping the future of how embodied agents make decisions. We’re building models that reason over time, adapt to user intent, and behave in human-aligned ways.

Where You’ll Have Impact

As a Tech Lead in the Behaviour Optimisation team, you will play a key role in shaping the intelligence behind how our embodied agents behave. This is a high-impact, hands-on technical role — combining deep individual contribution with technical leadership across critical research areas.

You’ll lead the design and implementation of new learning algorithms that govern the decision-making layer of our AI agent. You’ll guide experimentation strategy, shape architectural decisions, and prototype scalable learning methods — all while collaborating closely with engineering partners to bring research to real-world deployment.

This is an opportunity for a high-agency, technically exceptional individual to work at the frontier of embodied AI — where perception meets action, and behaviour becomes learnable, adaptable, and human-aligned.

Key responsibilities:

• Architect the future – Design and evolve models for efficient, robust, and adaptable autonomy, setting a high technical bar for quality and innovation.

• Accelerate research impact – Partner with team members to test, scale, and productionise research ideas - from architecture design to data strategy. Provide technical guidance and feedback on research design, implementation, and evaluation. Implement scalable, high-throughput training pipelines for models with temporal context and develop and evaluate novel data sampling strategies to accelerate training and generalisation.

• Get hands-on when it matters – Lead from the front by contributing directly to key system components, codebases, and experiments, especially during high-leverage moments. Contribute directly as an IC on core research and development tasks (~60-70% of time).

• Disrupt thoughtfully – Challenge assumptions, ask sharp questions, and champion bold ideas that push us beyond incremental gains and toward breakthrough advances.

• Make things happen – Lead a high-performing, cross-functional team of applied scientists and ML engineers working across ML, RL, representation learning, planning, among many more. Work closely with the team manager to drive quarterly planning and execution of research-engineering initiatives, enabling rapid iteration and delivery in high-ambiguity environments. Translate ambiguity into action and ensure technical progress tracks with our mission.

• Champion change – Lead through ambiguity. Balance structure and adaptability to help your team navigate evolving priorities, novel research, and complex organisational change.

About you

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

Essential

• 5+ years of experience in applied ML/AI roles with strong hands-on contributions.
• Demonstrated track record of impactful technical work in one or more of: multimodal learning, reinforcement learning, generative models, latent action modelling, optimisation, or planning.
• Experience building large-scale ML infrastructure and working with high-dimensional temporal data (e.g., video, multi-sensor inputs).
• Deep understanding of the end-to-end lifecycle of ML research and deployment.
• Strong Python and PyTorch engineering fundamentals, with experience developing research-grade, production-oriented tools.
• Proven ability to shape technical strategy and lead architectural design for ML systems.
• Publications at top-tier ML conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, CoRL or ICLR.
• Clear and thoughtful communicator, capable of influencing technical direction and mentoring others without formal reporting lines.

Desirable

• Experience working in autonomous vehicles (AVs), robotics, simulation, or other embodied AI domains.
• 2+ years of experience in a technical leadership or tech lead capacity.
• Contributions to open-source ML tooling or large-scale training infrastructure.
• Prior experience in startup-like or high-ambiguity environments, where adaptability and initiative are key.

This role may not be for you if:

• You prefer people leadership over technical execution
• You’re looking to step away from hands-on coding
• You’re uncomfortable working in open-ended research with shifting priorities

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.

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.