Engineering Manager, Runtime Platform, Robot 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 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.

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.