Controls Engineeer

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

In this role you will develop and improve the vehicle trajectory and motion controllers that translate the Wayve AI Driver outputs into safe, smooth and robust vehicle motion across different vehicle platforms and applications (both ADAS and AV). You’ll tackle cutting-edge challenges: developing principled controls approaches, implementing real time systems, testing in complex scenarios and refining our evaluation pipelines. This is a great chance to make an impact on the AV industry and grow alongside a focused team of passionate experts at the forefront of autonomous driving technology.

Key responsibilities:

• Develop, integrate, tune, and validate control, trajectory-generation, and action-processing algorithms across different vehicle platforms, operating modes, and challenging driving conditions, ensuring robust real-world performance
• Maintain and evolve our controls software architecture that connects AI Driver outputs to real-time vehicle actuation and feedback
• Implement and maintain production-quality, latency-sensitive control software in C++ for deployment to prototype, reference and production vehicles
• Use simulation, closed-loop evaluation and on-road testing to characterize controller behaviour, diagnose performance issues and validate improvements
• Work with teams across Wayve to define controller interfaces, integrate with adjacent systems and enable new vehicle platforms and product features

Required Skills/Experience

• Strong fundamentals in control theory, with depth in one or more of optimization, model-predictive control, numerical methods or dynamical systems
• Practical experience developing, tuning and validating control or motion systems on real world physical systems
• Strong software engineering skills, with experience building reliable production-quality systems in C++
• Experience with latency-sensitive or real-time software
• Ability to reason about and debug system-level behaviour in complex robotic systems across software and hardware

Desired Skills/Experience

• Applied experience with model predictive control, trajectory optimization, motion planning etc.
• Direct experience with mobile robotics or autonomous vehicle systems
• Experience in the automotive industry, including ADAS or vehicle controls
• Experience with safety-critical systems, validation, and relevant industry standards (e.g. ISO 26262)
• Applied machine learning experience, or experience developing systems that integrate with ML components

This is a full-time role based in our office in Sunnyvale. 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.

The reasonably estimated salary for this role ranges from $209,700 to $266,800 plus a competitive equity package. Actual compensation is based on the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience.

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.