Applied Scientist Machine Learning Jobs in California

Wayve is building embodied AI for the physical world, starting with autonomous driving. Instead of the hand-engineered, modular stacks that defined the first era of self-driving, we pioneered AV2.0: a single, end-to-end neural network that learns to drive from raw sensor data and generalises to new cities, vehicles, and conditions. Our foundation models, the GAIA family of generative world models and the LINGO family of vision-language-action models, let vehicles perceive, reason, and act in the open world. We have driven zero-shot across hundreds of cities on three continents, and we are now scaling from proving the science to deploying it with leading automakers and mobility partners, including Nissan, Stellantis, and Uber.

The role

This role sits in the AI Platform organisation, on the data flywheel that powers every model we ship. The thesis is simple and compounding: the more intelligently we curate, enrich, and evaluate the real-world driving experience our fleet generates, the faster our foundation models improve, and the further they generalise across geographies, embodiments, and OEM platforms. As deployment scales, the bottleneck is shifting from raw model capacity to the quality and intelligence of the data engine and the rigour of how we measure progress. That is the problem you will own.

This is a dual-track role: we are hiring at either Applied Scientist or Machine Learning Engineer, at TC3 (Senior) or TC4 (Staff / Tech Lead), calibrated to your background. We are open on specialisation. There are three areas we are hiring into, and you can go deep in any one of them:

• Data curation: mine world-scale fleet data for the rare, long-tail, and safety-critical moments that move the model.
• Data enrichment: turn raw driving experience into high-signal training data through (semi-)automated enrichment, labeling, and data quality at scale.
• Foundation model evaluation: define how we know a driving foundation model is genuinely getting better, offline and in closed loop.

Day to day, the role also spans the broader foundation-model stack, including vision-language-action and vision-language models for embodied AI, world modeling, policy learning, reinforcement learning, and reward modeling.

Key responsibilities

• Mine world-scale fleet data for rare, long-tail, and safety-critical events using active learning, smart sampling, and embedding-based retrieval and dedup.
• Figure out what makes a good training dataset: which data, mix, and balance actually move the model, and turn that into repeatable curation across cities, sensor rigs, and embodiments.
• Build high-quality enrichments that teams across the company depend on, through (semi-)automated enrichment and labeling pipelines and data quality at scale.
• Build and fine-tune large-scale pretrained models, and run smaller-scale experiments to test and derisk ideas before committing serious compute.
• Help build the best embodied VLM / VLA in the world for driving (the LINGO line): push multimodal perception, reasoning, language, and action.
• Design rigorous offline and closed-loop evaluation: metrics and benchmarks that correlate with real on-road behaviour and safety, with deliberate coverage of rare and safety-critical scenarios.
• Use world-model-based evaluation (GAIA) to probe counterfactual "what if" scenarios safely, repeatably, and at scale.
• Contribute across the wider foundation-model stack as the work demands: generative world models (GAIA), policy learning, reinforcement learning, and reward modeling.

About you

Essential

• A Masters with around 6 or more years of relevant experience, or a PhD with 2 or more years, in computer science, machine learning, robotics, mathematics, or a related field (required).
• Strong ML and software fundamentals, and a track record of taking ML from research into production systems that run at scale.
• Hands-on strength in one or more of: data curation, foundation model training, large-scale data wrangling, and foundation-model evaluation (for example, evaluation of LLMs or similar large models).
• Experience with large-scale data and/or large neural networks, and the judgment to know which experiments and which data actually matter.
• Fluency in Python and a modern deep-learning framework (PyTorch or similar), and comfort working with large, messy, real-world datasets.

Desirable

• Autonomous driving, robotics, or other embodied-AI domains.
• Foundation models, VLMs, world models, diffusion or autoregressive generative models, or reinforcement learning and reward modeling.
• Large-scale data infrastructure: embedding and vector search (e.g. turbopuffer, Milvus), distributed data processing (Ray Data, Daft, Spark), lakehouse formats (Lance, Iceberg), or annotation tooling.
• Closed-loop or simulation-based evaluation, and safety-critical ML.
• Publications at top ML, CV, or robotics venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, CoRL, RSS).

This is a full-time role based in our office in Sunnyvale.  At Wayve we want the best of all worlds so we operate a hybrid working policy that combines time together in our offices and workshops to fuel innovation, culture, relationships and learning, and time spent working from home. The reasonably estimated salary for this role ranges from $311,850 to $370,000, plus a competitive equity package. Actual compensation is based on the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience.