Staff Applied Scientist, Wayve

Foundation Models

Salary not provided

+ Equity

Senior and Expert level

San Francisco Bay Area

More information about location

2-5 days a week in office (Sunnyvale, CA)

Autonomous mobility driven by AI

Job no longer available

Autonomous mobility driven by AI

501-1000 employees

B2CB2BArtificial IntelligenceCarsTransportBig dataDeep TechRoboticsFlexible workingComputer VisionMachine LearningSaaSCloud Computing

Job no longer available

Salary not provided

+ Equity

Senior and Expert level

San Francisco Bay Area

More information about location

2-5 days a week in office (Sunnyvale, CA)

501-1000 employees

B2CB2BArtificial IntelligenceCarsTransportBig dataDeep TechRoboticsFlexible workingComputer VisionMachine LearningSaaSCloud Computing

Company mission

To reimagine autonomous mobility with embodies intelligence, aiming to lead the world into a new era of autonomy.

Job

Company

Role

Who you are

You possess a passion for solving complex problems in AI and Robotics with a creative and analytical approach
You demonstrate leadership in scientific research, with a track record of impactful contributions to academia and/or industry
You enjoy collaborative innovation, working closely with a team of Applied Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, and Software Engineers to transform research into reality
Masters, PhD or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline
Proven expertise in machine learning, with a focus on areas valuable to our team, such as reinforcement learning, foundation models, perception, large scale pretraining, large language models or large-scale multi-modal models
Demonstrated leadership in scientific efforts, with contributions to top-tier conferences and journals
Exceptional ability to work within and lead a cross-functional team, fostering an environment of collaboration and innovation

What the job involves

As a vital member of our research team, you'll harness your expertise to explore and expand the boundaries of AI in autonomous driving. This role will challenge you to leverage our vast datasets, architect advanced models, and invent novel learning paradigms to ensure the scalability and efficiency of our models
In this role, you might:
Pioneer the development of Foundation Models for robotics, enabling unprecedented generalization across diverse environments and embodiments
Innovate in multi-modal end-to-end learned models for a wide variety of tasks, including planning
Employ and advance the state-of-the-art in imitation learning and reinforcement learning for dynamic decision-making in real-world scenarios
Explore Large Language and Large Multi-Modal Models and their integration into autonomous systems to improve interpretability, explainability and environmental understanding
Collaborate with cross-functional, international teams to integrate research findings into scalable, production-level solutions
Contribute to academic publications for top-tier conferences like NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ICRA, ICLR, CoRL, COLM, etc. working in a world-class team, contributing to the scientific community and establishing Wayve as a leader in the field

Our take

Wayve is developing AI that teaches cars to drive autonomously using reinforcement learning, simulation, and computer vision. Wayve’s core premise is that the big breakthrough in self-driving cars will come from better AI brains rather than more sensors or “hand-coded” rules which it believes are highly restrictive and not at all scalable.

The company said that it trains its autonomous driving system using simulated environments and then transfers that knowledge into the real world, where it emulates how humans adapt to conditions in real time. It ultimately relies on end-to-end deep learning AI rather than hard-engineered AI. This is one of the world's hardest problems to solve, but Wayve has made an exciting start and is taking a very different approach to competitors like Uber and Waymo, who are relying more on sensors.

Following a few years of innovative breakthroughs, Wayve now has backing from high-profile investors such as Microsoft and angels, including Uber's chief scientist Zoubin Ghahramani and Pieter Abbeel, a UC Berkeley robotics professor and pioneer of deep reinforcement learning. The company's strategic partnerships with outfits like Asda and Ocado to test-run autonomous deliveries, as well as publicity through the Minister is a show of confidence in the future of Wayve's solution to autonomous driving.

Kirsty

Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle

Insights

Top investors

28% female employees

24% employee growth in 12 months

Glassdoor (4.6)

Company

Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)

May 2024

$1.1bn

SERIES C

Jan 2022

$200m

SERIES B

Total funding: $1.3bn

Company benefits

Private healthcare: Choose our optional health insurance for comprehensive coverage for you and your family.
Paid time off: Paid vacation plus public holidays and additional leave programs, ensuring you have time to unwind.
Mental health resources: Through Spill, you can access therapy and mental health support.
Community and socials: Join clubs or attend team socials to connect over hobbies, sports, or just for fun.
Competitive compensation: Our compensation package includes cash and equity, making you a true partner in our success.
Learning and development: Budgets for books, courses, and company-wide training to support your continuous growth.

Company HQ

London, UK

Leadership

Alex Kendall

(Co-Founder & CEO)

Alex has a PhD from Cambridge in Computer Vision & Robotics. Prior to Wayve, he was a Research Fellow at Trinity College, a Scientific Advisor at Scape Technologies, a Research Engineer at Skydio, and a Software Engineer at Beca.

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