Tech Lead / Manager - Trajectory Generation and Controls

About the role

The Tech Lead / Manager - Trajectory Generation and Controls role at Wayve involves leading the Motion Controls team, which is responsible for delivering robust real-world vehicle motion across Wayve’s product platforms. This role combines technical leadership, team development, and delivery ownership, with opportunities to shape both near-term product impact and the longer-term evolution of Wayve’s technology.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and develop the Motion Controls team, providing strong people leadership, technical direction, and clear priorities for an experienced and growing group of engineers.

• Own the team’s technical roadmap and delivery across short and long term horizons, translating product and system needs into clear priorities, technical plans, and timely execution.

• Own the interface between the Wayve AI Driver, trajectory generation, and control in a deployed autonomy system.

• Provide strong technical judgment across control, trajectory generation, and adjacent ML-informed system design, holding a high bar for engineering quality, technical rigor, deployed system performance, and motion quality.

• Work with key partners to align technical plans, product needs, and integration constraints in the delivery of robust deployed motion behavior.

• Shape the future direction and growth of the team to address emerging challenges at the intersection of control, AI, and real-world vehicle behavior.

About You

• Essential Experience:

  • Managing or leading engineers including setting priorities, driving execution, and supporting their growth and performance.
  • Leading technical direction for complex autonomy, robotics, or other physical AI systems, ideally in autonomous vehicles or a closely related domain.
  • Building, shipping, and maintaining production systems, including translating product and system requirements into technical plans and execution.
  • Expertise in controls, trajectory generation, motion planning, or closely related autonomy problems, including strong understanding of physical system dynamics, closed-loop behavior, and controller design tradeoffs.
  • Experience working on production systems that incorporate machine learning models, ideally in domains such as prediction, trajectory generation, planning, or control.
  • Experience working across system boundaries, with the ability to consider factors across software, platform, and physical boundaries.
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals, with experience delivering high-quality production code and setting a high technical bar for others.

• Desirable Experience:

  • Managing engineers and growing teams.
  • Experience with classical search- or optimization-based motion planning, optimal control, MPC, or related motion-generation methods.
  • Experience working in production release environments, ideally involving real hardware or multiple platforms.
  • Experience with automotive-grade software development processes or safety-related standards such as ISO26262 or SOTIF.
  • Experience with Python and C++ in production autonomy or robotics systems.

What You’ll Get

• A full-time role based in Sunnyvale, CA (hybrid).

• Competitive salary range: $276,100 to $311,400.

• A competitive equity package.

What You Won’t Get

• No cookie/navigation/legal/EEO/equal-opportunity/scam-warning boilerplate, duplicated lines, or application instructions.