Distinguished Software Architect

Role details

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 Role Wayve is building the next generation of embodied AI for autonomous driving. As we move from developing our core technology to deploying it across multiple vehicle platforms, OEM programmes and Robotaxi applications, the complexity of our software systems is growing significantly. We’re looking for a Distinguished Software Architect to help define how our software architecture evolves through this next phase of scale. This is a highly cross-functional individual contributor role, working across our onboard software, AI, simulation, training and inference, product engineering and Robotaxi teams. You’ll work alongside some of our most senior technical and engineering leaders to ensure that the systems we build today can scale across the products and platforms we need tomorrow. 🧠 Your day-to-day You’ll operate across engineering organisations rather than within a single team, developing a deep understanding of how our software systems fit together and where architectural decisions in one area impact another. You’ll work closely with senior engineers and engineering leaders to identify architectural challenges, shape technical direction and lead major changes that span multiple teams. You’ll act as a trusted technical partner on some of our hardest engineering decisions, helping teams navigate trade-offs between immediate delivery needs and the long-term health and scalability of the overall system. A significant part of the role will be leading through technical credibility and influence, creating alignment across teams and helping raise the bar for software design and engineering practices across Wayve. 🧩 What you’ll be working on - Defining architectural direction across Wayve’s software ecosystem as we scale across an increasing number of vehicle platforms and products. - Creating clear software boundaries, interfaces and abstractions that allow teams to develop quickly without introducing unnecessary fragmentation. - Leading large architectural changes that span multiple engineering organisations. - Improving how software is developed, integrated, tested and deployed across different vehicle platforms and programmes. - Working across onboard software, AI, simulation, training and inference, product engineering and Robotaxi systems. - Helping shape the development platforms and engineering systems that underpin how Wayve builds software at scale. - Partnering with teams working with OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers to ensure our architecture can support different production environments and integrations. - Acting as a technical decision-maker and tiebreaker on complex architectural decisions. - Helping establish a strong engineering and design culture for building large-scale, safety-critical software systems. 🙌 You should apply if - You’ve operated as a Principal, Distinguished or equivalent senior individual contributor and have shaped the architecture of large, complex software systems. - You have a track record of leading significant technical or architectural change across multiple teams or engineering organisations. - You’re an exceptional systems thinker who can understand a broad technical landscape while still going deep where necessary. - You’ve built or evolved software platforms that needed to operate reliably across significant scale and complexity. - You’re comfortable making difficult technical trade-offs and can distinguish between what is right for an individual team and what is right for the broader system. - You can influence senior engineers and engineering leaders through technical credibility rather than organisational authority. - You care deeply about software design, engineering quality and creating systems that enable other engineers to move faster. - You can enter unfamiliar technical domains, learn quickly and develop strong technical judgment. - You combine architectural thinking with a strong bias towards execution and turning technical direction into real engineering change. Experience in autonomous driving, robotics or automotive systems can be valuable, but isn’t essential. We’re particularly interested in people who have solved complex software architecture problems at significant scale and can bring that experience into a new technical domain. 🌱 Not ticking every box? That’s totally okay! If you’re passionate about autonomy and keen to learn, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement. More about Wayve: 🚀 Wayve is building the leading AI platform for autonomous driving. We are pioneering an end to end AI approach that enables vehicles to learn directly from real world experience, developing the ability to adapt, generalise and improve at scale. Instead of relying on hand coded rules or pre mapped environments, our AI Driver learns to drive by understanding the world around it. The result is technology that navigates complex urban environments with intelligence, precision and natural flow, unlocking meaningful advances in both safety and efficiency. We believe autonomy represents a once in a generation transformation in how people and goods move, comparable to the shift from horses to cars, and from human driven vehicles to intelligent machines. Our ambition is to make autonomy universal. Wayve’s mapless and hardware agnostic AI platform integrates with global OEM partners, enabling continuous software evolution and unlocking advanced levels of automation from L2 plus through to L4 as our core AI model scales. In a race increasingly defined by intelligence and real world learning, Wayve is taking a distinct approach, building a generalisable driving intelligence that can power any vehicle, anywher