Engineering Manager, SRE – AV Fleet, Japan

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.

The role

Wayve is looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead the Japan team responsible for the reliability, safety and availability of our autonomous vehicle fleet. You will lead the Japan Fleet Reliability SRE team, collaborate closely with the separate Field Engineering organisation, own your team’s people, roadmap and reliability outcomes, and connect Japan’s real-world needs with global Vehicle Software engineering.

This is not a coordination-only role: you will stay close to incidents, designs, code and vehicle systems while building an organisation that can scale beyond any individual.

Key Responsibilities

• Build, coach and retain a high-performing, inclusive Japan Fleet Reliability SRE team with clear ownership and sustainable escalation coverage.
• Maximise safe on-road time by improving fleet health, incident response, release reliability and operational readiness.
• Turn recurring vehicle and software failure modes into durable engineering improvements, automation and measurable reliability targets.
• Create a scalable operating model for new vehicle platforms, Gen 3 capabilities and future commercial fleet growth in Japan.
• Represent Japan’s operational needs in global engineering priorities while bringing global standards and lessons back into local operations.

What you will do

Lead and develop the team

• Own team engagement, performance, hiring, onboarding, development and retention; set clear expectations and provide timely, high-quality feedback.
• Coach SREs through regular one-to-ones, growth plans and career conversations, addressing performance gaps early and fairly.
• Plan team capacity and skills against the roadmap, assign the right people to the highest-value problems and maintain a sustainable on-call and support model.
• Create psychological safety while holding a high bar for engineering quality, operational discipline, ownership and follow-through.
• Lead the team through organisational, technical and programme change with clarity, empathy and decisiveness.

Own reliable and safe fleet operations

• Be the accountable engineering escalation point for Japan fleet reliability, including high-severity incidents and operational risks.
• Establish clear incident command, escalation and communication practices across Fleet Operations, Vehicle Safety Operators and engineering teams.
• Improve detection, diagnosis and recovery for failures across vehicle compute, sensors, power, networking, software deployment, model delivery, data capture and offload workflows.
• Ensure post-incident reviews are blameless, evidence-based and converted into owned corrective actions, preventive controls and reusable playbooks.
• Maintain healthy on-call rotations, effective runbooks and clear handoffs across Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Raise operational excellence and reliability engineering

• Define and evolve service-level indicators, service-level objectives and error budgets for the fleet’s most important operational workflows.
• Use fleet health, availability, incident, change-failure, recovery-time, data-quality and toil metrics to identify priorities and demonstrate improvement.
• Set technical direction for observability, SLI/SLOs, production readiness, release safety, automation, remote diagnostics and fleet tooling; participate directly in design and code reviews and challenge failure assumptions.
• Embed production-readiness, observability, safe change management, release validation and rollback expectations into systems used by the Japan fleet.
• Balance immediate operational needs with technical debt reduction and long-term resilience.

Deliver Japan programmes predictably

• Translate company and programme goals into a clear Japan Fleet Reliability roadmap, milestones, staffing plan, dependencies and measurable outcomes.
• Partner with Vehicle Software, Fleet Operations, Field Engineering, VSI/Platform Integration, Vehicle Generalization, safety, infrastructure and programme teams to move new vehicles and capabilities into stable operations.
• Drive operational readiness for new vehicle variants and capabilities, including commissioning, validation, release rollout, field support and handover into steady-state operations.
• Identify technical, people and schedule risks early; make trade-offs explicit, escalate appropriately and keep stakeholders informed without creating unnecessary process.
• Build strong, respectful relationships with Japanese OEMs, suppliers and operational partners where the role requires engineering coordination.

Build scalable tooling and automation

• Guide the design and delivery of tools, services and APIs that improve fleet visibility, health monitoring, remote diagnosis, configuration, release safety and operational control.
• Automate repetitive investigation, recovery and reporting workflows so fleet growth does not require linear headcount growth.
• Ensure tooling supports auditable decisions, clear ownership and safe operation, with appropriate access controls and failure handling.
• Create feedback loops that turn field observations and failure data into priorities for platform, vehicle and software engineering teams.

Communicate and collaborate across boundaries

• Communicate clearly and promptly during incidents, programme reviews, planning and day-to-day collaboration across local and global teams.
• Provide concise status, risk and decision updates to technical and non-technical stakeholders, adapting detail to the audience.
• Clarify ownership and interfaces between Fleet Reliability SRE, Field Engineering, Fleet Operations, VSI/Platform Integration, Vehicle Generalization and other partner teams.
• Represent the team’s roadmap and operational evidence in global forums, influence upstream roadmaps and mentor people beyond your direct team.

What success looks like

• A capable, engaged and accountable Japan Fleet Reliability SRE team with clear ownership, strong development plans and a sustainable support model.
• Improving safe fleet availability, faster detection and recovery, fewer repeat incidents and more reliable software and model rollouts.
• Critical workflows have useful SLIs and SLOs, and reliability investment is prioritised using operational evidence rather than anecdotes.
• New vehicles and capabilities move from engineering bring-up to stable operations through repeatable readiness gates and clear handoffs.
• Japan priorities and risks are visible early, dependencies are actively managed and committed roadmap outcomes are delivered predictably.
• Automation and tooling measurably reduce manual work and enable the fleet to scale without proportional operational overhead.

About you

Essential

• Engineering-management experience with direct accountability for a software, SRE, platform, systems or similarly technical team.
• A track record of leading and developing a team of approximately 5–10 engineers or similarly complex multidisciplinary groups.
• Practical mastery of reliability engineering, observability, incident management, release and change safety, resilience and continuous improvement.
• Strong engineering depth and current credibility in design review, debugging, automation, code review and production systems.
• Experience owning roadmaps, resourcing, dependencies, technical trade-offs and measurable delivery outcomes.
• Evidence of hiring, coaching, developing and managing performance while creating clarity, accountability and psychological safety.
• Calm, structured judgement during incidents and the ability to communicate risk clearly to senior, technical and operational stakeholders.
• Willingness to work regularly onsite in the Yokohama area and join an engineering escalation rotation.
• Permission to work in Japan, or eligibility for employer-supported immigration where applicable to the final hiring plan.

Desirable

• Autonomous vehicles, robotics, automotive software, embedded or edge compute, safety-critical systems or large physical fleets.
• Vehicle commissioning, compute or sensor integration, networking, diagnostics, data offload or over-the-air deployment.
• Linux, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, telemetry pipelines, infrastructure as code and modern observability tooling.
• Building internal automation or platforms in Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript or a comparable language.
• Experience collaborating with Japanese automotive manufacturers, suppliers or mobility operators in a global engineering organisation.

How we work

People leadership is the first priority in this role. You will empower the team rather than micromanage, stay technically engaged without becoming the team’s bottleneck, and create an environment where concerns are raised early. We value blameless learning, measurable outcomes, direct but respectful feedback and pragmatic engineering that balances speed, safety and reliability.

This position is based in Japan and is not fully remote. The role requires regular presence with the team and fleet, occasional work outside standard office hours for critical operational events, and domestic or international travel as programme needs require. Specific working arrangements will be discussed during the hiring process.

Why join Wayve

• Lead reliability at the point where advanced AI meets real vehicles, real roads and real customers.
• Shape Japan’s operating model while influencing global fleet and platform engineering standards.
• Work on problems spanning software, infrastructure, vehicle systems and operations, where reliability directly enables safe autonomy.
• Join a mission-driven, international team with competitive compensation, equity and locally applicable benefits.

This is a full-time role based in our office in Yokohama, Japan. 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.

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.