SRE Manager, Vehicle Software

Before the detail, here's the challenge you'd help us solve.

We build the embodied intelligence that moves real vehicles safely, and the ecosystem a billion machines will run on in the future. Very few people in AI can say this. Every role here, whatever the team, plugs into that.

Here’s what this particular role covers.

🛠️ About our SRE Engineering Teams

Our SRE teams build the software that brings Wayve’s autonomous-driving technology onto real vehicles. Their work connects onboard compute, sensors, networking ,fleet operations and requires systems that can be deployed, monitored and recovered reliably as we expand across vehicle platforms and markets.

🧠 Your day-to-day

• Interview, onboard and coach engineers, setting clear expectations and supporting their performance and career growth.

• Work with engineering managers and technical leads to review reliability risks, agree on ownership and prioritize the team’s work.

• Stay hands-on by designing solutions, writing production code and reviewing critical changes alongside your team.

• Lead technical investigations and incident reviews, turning findings into concrete fixes and follow-up work.

• Coordinate focused projects with Vehicle Software teams, helping them improve reliability while retaining ownership of their systems.

• Review reliability metrics and roadmap progress, adjusting priorities to reflect product milestones, fleet needs and operational risk.

• Communicate technical decisions, trade-offs and results to engineering and company leaders.

🧩 What you’ll be working on

• Building the Vehicle Software SRE team from the ground up, including its charter, team structure, hiring plan, operating model and technical strategy.

• Reliability foundations for onboard software and the workflows that deploy, configure, start, monitor and recover it across vehicle platforms and markets.

• Service-level indicators and objectives, error budgets and production-readiness standards that give teams clear measures of system health and release readiness.

• Observability, health signals and diagnostic tools that help engineers understand failures across onboard compute, sensors, networking and vehicle data.

• Safer deployment and recovery through automated validation, release gates, smoke tests, rollback mechanisms and resilience testing.

• Incident-response workflows, runbooks, escalation paths and sustainable on-call practices that reduce repeat failures and speed up recovery.

• Automation and self-service tools that reduce manual operational work and help vehicle operations scale.

🙌 You should apply if

• You have 3+ years of engineering-management experience, with direct responsibility for hiring, performance management, coaching and career development.

• You have 8+ years of experience building or operating complex production software, with depth in SRE, production engineering, platform engineering, embedded systems or a related field.

• You have built or substantially reshaped an engineering team or capability, setting technical direction across teams, clarifying ownership and aligning partners around difficult trade-offs to deliver measurable results.

• You still write production-quality code, design systems and lead substantive code reviews. You have a strong technical judgment across Linux and distributed systems.

• You have applied SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident management and release-safety practices to deliver measurable improvements—not just restore service when something breaks.

• You build an inclusive team culture with clear accountability, thoughtful feedback and blameless learning from incidents.

• You have a degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Bonus points if you have experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, automotive or other safety-critical systems.

🌱 Not ticking every box? That’s totally okay! If you’re passionate about autonomy and keen to learn, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement.

More about Wayve:

🚀 Wayve is building the leading AI platform for autonomous driving. We are pioneering an end to end AI approach that enables vehicles to learn directly from real world experience, developing the ability to adapt, generalise and improve at scale. Instead of relying on hand coded rules or pre mapped environments, our AI Driver learns to drive by understanding the world around it. The result is technology that navigates complex urban environments with intelligence, precision and natural flow, unlocking meaningful advances in both safety and efficiency. We believe autonomy represents a once in a generation transformation in how people and goods move, comparable to the shift from horses to cars, and from human driven vehicles to intelligent machines.

Our ambition is to make autonomy universal. Wayve’s mapless and hardware agnostic AI platform integrates with global OEM partners, enabling continuous software evolution and unlocking advanced levels of automation from L2 plus through to L4 as our core AI model scales. In a race increasingly defined by intelligence and real world learning, Wayve is taking a distinct approach, building a generalisable driving intelligence that can power any vehicle, anywhere. By combining embodied AI with scalable deployment, we are creating technology that can be shaped to each OEM brand and driver experience, accelerating the transition to a safer, more intelligent future of mobility.

How we work 💻- Locations & Flexible Working:

Our main hubs are in London, Sunnyvale, Yokohama, Herzliya, Vancouver and Leonberg. We operate a hybrid working model that combines in-person collaboration in our dedicated office spaces with focused time working remotely. This gives our teams the connection and energy of working together, alongside the flexibility to do their best work in a way that fits their lives.

🔍 The Interview Process:

Our process is clear and respectful of your time:

• Initial call / recruiter screen (30 mins)

• Competency interviews: Hiring Manager Screen (1 hour).

• Deep-dive technical interviews: Programming, Technical Leadership, System Design (3 hours in total).

• Final interview: mission & values alignment (1 hour).

We’ll always explain the format and work around your availability.

What’s in it for you (Location dependant):

💰 Salaries benchmarked against the market annually
📈 Meaningful equity, sharing in the ownership and long term success of Wayve
✈️ Relocation support and visa sponsorship where applicable
✅ Hybrid working, core hours and the chance to work hands on in vehicle workshops and labs
📚 Learning and development budgets with support for training, conferences and growth
🩺 Comprehensive benefits including health insurance, dental, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, retirement or pension where applicable, access to therapists, wellbeing partnerships, team socials and more

A quick, honest note before you apply.

Wayve is not a mature, fully-structured place with the playbook already written. Much of how we work is still being written, and if you join, you’ll help write it. That suits people who want real ownership more than people who need a settled structure from day one.

If that sounds like the kind of problem you want to spend your time on, we’d really like to hear from you.

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

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.