Applied Scientist, Wayve Labs in London

Founded in 2017, Wayve is the leading developer of Embodied AI technology. Our advanced AI software and foundation models enable vehicles to perceive, understand, and navigate any complex environment, enhancing the usability and safety of automated driving systems.

The Role

We’re looking for Applied Scientists to join Wayve Labs and help build the next generation of AI systems for autonomous driving. You’ll work at the intersection of machine learning, simulation, robotics, and real‑world deployment, contributing to core innovations that push the boundaries of embodied AI.

Areas of Focus

• World & Reward Modeling: Building realistic, diverse simulators that can predict the consequences and costs of actions.
• Representation Learning & Spatial Intelligence: Advancing how machines truly understand and navigate dynamic, unstructured 3D environments, from detailed spatial understanding to efficient long‑term memory.
• Scalable Decision‑Making Systems: Designing architectures, reasoning systems, and policy learning algorithms that operate over long contexts and scale with data and compute.
• Cross‑Embodiment and Multimodal Learning: Advancing embodied learning systems that can flexibly adapt to diverse robotic platforms and multimodal inputs, using vision, language, and active sensors.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop world models and planners (e.g., diffusion‑based, autoregressive, or hybrid approaches) for realistic and consistent simulation.
• Advance reinforcement learning and reward modeling, building scalable and safe learning frameworks across real and synthetic data.
• Develop geometric foundation models for 3D spatial understanding in dynamic, real‑world environments.
• Enable cross‑embodiment robotics, leveraging the power of multimodal foundation models to accelerate robotic learning on diverse platforms.
• Conduct empirical research on scaling laws, generalisation, and sim‑to‑real transfer.
• Define and evolve evaluation frameworks and benchmarks for long‑horizon prediction, scene fidelity, and driving performance.

What You’ll Bring

Must‑haves

• 3+ years of experience developing and deploying ML systems in real‑world or production settings.
• PhD, Master’s degree, or equivalent experience in Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Robotics, or a related field.
• Deep expertise in one or more core embodied AI areas, such as foundation models, generative world modelling, reinforcement learning, or spatial AI.
• Track record of publications at top‑tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, CoRL).
• Strong programming skills in Python, with experience using frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Data‑centric mindset, with experience working on large‑scale datasets and evaluation.
• Strong problem‑solving ability and the ability to collaborate effectively in interdisciplinary teams.

Nice‑to‑haves

• Experience in autonomous driving, robotics, or simulation systems.
• Familiarity with large‑scale training (e.g., FSDP, DeepSpeed, JAX).
• Experience with sim‑to‑real transfer or data‑efficient learning.
• Contributions to open‑source ML tools or research infrastructure.

What We Offer You

• Attractive compensation with salary and equity.
• Immersion in a team of world‑class researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs.
• A unique position to shape the future of autonomy and tackle the biggest challenge of our time.
• Bespoke learning and development opportunities.
• Relocation support with visa sponsorship.
• Flexible working hours—trust you to do your job well, at times that suit you.
• Benefits such as onsite chef, workplace nursery scheme, private health insurance, therapy, daily yoga, onsite bar, large social budgets, unlimited L&D requests, enhanced parental leave, and more.

Full‑time role based in London. Wayve operates a hybrid working policy that combines time together in our offices and workshops with remote work as needed. We are committed to creating a diverse, fair, and respectful culture that is inclusive of everyone based on their unique skills and perspectives, and regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law. We do not ask about marriage or pregnancy, care responsibilities or disabilities in any of our job adverts or interviews, but we collect optional diversity information to improve our hiring process.