Site Reliability Engineering Manager, Vehicle Software

About the role

The role involves building the Vehicle Software SRE team from the ground up, owning technical direction for vehicle software reliability, defining SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, designing and implementing observability and automation, leading incident response, mentoring engineers, and ensuring reliability is a first-class property of the software running on vehicles.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a new SRE team from the ground up, staying hands-on as a player-coach on the team's most consequential work.
• Own technical direction for vehicle software reliability across deployment, service health, telemetry, and diagnostics; define what production-ready means at Wayve.
• Define SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for fleet-critical workflows; drive release criteria, automated gates, rollback strategies, and fault-injection practices across Vehicle Software.
• Design and implement the observability and automation that shortens the path from vehicle symptom to root cause, cuts the manual toil between failure and fix, and shapes systems for robustness, recoverability, and debuggability.
• Lead investigations into complex failures, ensure every incident produces a durable fix, and strengthen on-call practices and escalation paths across service-owning teams.
• Mentor engineers and emerging leaders, and give senior leadership the clarity on reliability health, risks, and investment they need to make good decisions.

Requirements

• 8+ years building and operating production software systems with strong depth in SRE, production engineering, platform engineering, embedded systems, or robotics, and a recent track record of writing production-quality code and leading architecture reviews across Linux-based, distributed, or hardware-software systems.
• 3+ years in people leadership with a track record of hiring, coaching, and growing engineers across levels while staying actively engaged in coding, design, and code review; experience forming a new team or capability from scratch is a strong plus.
• Proven experience with SLOs, error budgets, production-readiness standards, observability, incident management, postmortems, and toil-reduction programmes, with measurable outcomes to show for it.
• Calm and structured during incidents, with clear communication across software, hardware, operations, product, and executive stakeholders; a leadership approach grounded in ownership, blameless learning, and autonomy with accountability.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building production software, automation, and diagnostic tooling in C++, Rust, Python, or Go, with familiarity with CI/CD, release systems, telemetry pipelines, and modern observability tooling.
• Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, automotive software, safety-critical systems, or cyber-physical products deployed into uncontrolled real-world environments.
• Knowledge of onboard compute, sensors, middleware, vehicle networks, OTA deployment, data capture and offload, or multi-variant hardware-software integration.
• Experience improving reliability through the transition from research and prototype systems to commercial, multi-market operations.
• Experience partnering with fleet operations, field engineering, validation, hardware, or external vehicle and technology partners.

Skills

• Strong understanding of software reliability engineering principles and practices.
• Experience with distributed systems and cloud-native architectures.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Leadership and mentorship skills to guide a new team through growth and development.

Benefits

• Competitive salary range: $276,100 - $293,750
• Equity package
• Hybrid working policy combining time in the office and remote work
• Inclusive interview process
• Commitment to diversity, fairness, and respect

Pay

The reasonably estimated salary for this role ranges from $276,100 to $293,750.

Schedule

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