Staff Applied Scientist, Wayve
Foundation Models
+ Equity
More information about location
2-5 days a week in office (Mountain View, CA)
Autonomous mobility driven by AI
Open for applications
Autonomous mobility driven by AI
201-500 employees
Open for applications
+ Equity
More information about location
2-5 days a week in office (Mountain View, CA)
201-500 employees
Company mission
To reimagine autonomous mobility through embodied intelligence.
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 artificial intelligence (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
Some candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
28% female employees
24% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
May 2024
$1.1bn
SERIES C
Jan 2022
$200m
SERIES B
Total funding: $1.3bn
Company benefits
- Learning budget
- In-house chef
- Flexible Working
- Private health insurance and therapy
- Workplace nursery scheme
- Onsite bar
- Large social budgets
- Enhanced parental leave
Company values
- Pave new roads, explore unknown horizons: We take calculated risks and embrace unknown territory
- Leave positive tracks: A big reason for working on autonomous vehicles is for the positive impact they can have to the environment, the lives they will save, the opportunities they will create for others and more!
- Autonomous in thought, collective in action: We are built of strong, curious individuals coming from all walks of life, but who, together, want to achieve a common goal.
- Drive each other forward: We are a company that stands strong upon the foundation which it has created. This foundation is the team, the individuals who make Wayve, Wayve.
Company HQ
London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Alex Kendall
(CEO)Has a PhD from Cambridge in Computer Vision & Robotics. Previously Research Engineer at Skydio and Advisor to Scape Technologies
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