Machine Learning Engineer (Synthetic Data)

About us

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.

Our vision is to create autonomy that propels the world forward. Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic AI products are designed for automakers, accelerating the transition from assisted to automated driving. In our fast-paced environment big problems ignite us—we embrace uncertainty, leaning into complex challenges to unlock groundbreaking solutions. We aim high and stay humble in our pursuit of excellence, constantly learning and evolving as we pave the way for a smarter, safer future.

At Wayve, your contributions matter. We value diversity, embrace new perspectives, and foster an inclusive work environment; we back each other to deliver impact.

Make Wayve the experience that defines your career!

The role

Simulation is advancing end-to-end autonomous driving research. The team’s mission is to accelerate AV2.0 by incubating capabilities that become company-level advantages — generative world models and the synthetic data they produce are one of those.

The goal of this role is to build, scale, and optimise next-generation world model architectures (GAIA and successors) and bridge them into high-throughput generation and training infrastructure, so synthetic data can dramatically accelerate autonomy development.

You will post-train world models for new embodiments and behaviours (rig transfer, pose transfer, dashcam restaging), generate multimodal synthetic experience at scale, and land that data in the same training stack we use for real driving. You sit between ML research and engineering: collaborating with scientists on architecture and conditioning, and with platform engineers on generation jobs, training artefacts, and how synthetic data is mixed into training.

Your work will decide how fast we can train, evaluate, and deploy driving models on vehicles we have barely collected from.

Key responsibilities:

• Post-train and iterate GAIA-class world models for synthetic-data capabilities: rig transfer (new camera/vehicle embodiments), pose transfer (rewritten ego trajectories), and related conditioning (geometry, calibration, actions).
• Own the generation loop: config → large-scale GPU inference → training-ready artefacts, with clear lineage from the model and settings that produced them.
• Land synthetic data in driving-model training (behaviour cloning, reward models, RL): binarisation, mix ratios, quality filters, and experiments that measure suite and on-road impact — including when synthetic should replace scarce real rig data.
• Diagnose and fix geometry, calibration, and controllability failures (intrinsics/extrinsics, NVS warps, odometry/curvature, flickering, camera-layout artefacts) that determine whether generated video is training-grade.
• Improve throughput and yield: inference optimisations (shortcut, distillation, KV cache, step count), valid-generation rate, and self-serve workflows so model developers can request synthetic sets without a specialist.
• Expand coverage to new vehicle platforms and safety-critical scenarios (OEM bring-up; Emergency Lane Keeping / Automatic Emergency Braking).
• Partner with world-model researchers, infra, and driving-model owners so generation, evaluation, and training stay one system.

About you

To set you up for success as a MLE at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience:

• 4+ years in applied ML / research engineering, with a track record of training and shipping neural nets, not only operating data platforms.
• Strong Python and PyTorch (or equivalent); comfort with GPU training, debugging, and reading model code.
• Hands-on experience with video, generative, or world models (diffusion / flow-matching / autoregressive video, novel-view synthesis, neural rendering, or similar).
• Working knowledge of cameras and 3D geometry (multi-camera rigs, intrinsics/extrinsics, warps/reprojection) and why they break generation or downstream training.
• Evidence of taking generated or simulated data into a trained downstream model and measuring impact (mix, ablations, failure analysis).
• Ability to operate generation or training at real scale (multi-GPU jobs, workflow orchestration, large video artefacts) and to make that path reliable.
• Collaborative, experimental working style with researchers and platform engineers; you will own a capability, not a ticket queue.

Desirable

• World models, video diffusion/flow, or controllable generation (action, pose, camera, text).
• Distillation, few-step sampling, KV caching, or other inference-speed work on large generative models.
• AV / robotics / simulation; multi-sensor driving data (video, telemetry; LiDAR a plus).
• Productionising research: Flyte/Ray/Spark-style jobs, dataset lineage, training mix configuration.
• Reward models, offline RL, or closed-loop evaluation of driving policies.
• Cloud GPU fleets (Azure/AWS/GCP) and distributed training.

Why Join Us

• Shape autonomy through generative simulation. Your models and data will decide whether we can train a new vehicle before the fleet exists.
• Work at the frontier of world models. GAIA-scale video generation, camera transfer, pose control, and the training stack that consumes it — with the compute and fleet data to match.
• Close the loop to the road. This is not synthetic data for slides. Generated experience already feeds models we take on the road; you will extend that to the next platforms and features.
• High-trust, high-autonomy team. You will work with the people who built rig transfer and the generation stack — and be expected to own the next capability.

This is a full-time role based in our office in London. 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. We operate core working hours so you can determine the schedule that works best for you and your team.

Wayve is committed to creating an inclusive interview experience. If you require any accommodations or adjustments to participate fully in our interview process, please let us know.

We understand that everyone has a unique set of skills and experiences and that not everyone will meet all of the requirements listed above. If you’re passionate about self-driving cars and think you have what it takes to make a positive impact on the world, we encourage you to apply. At Wayve we're 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.

For more information visit Careers at Wayve.

To learn more about what drives us, visit Values at Wayve

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DISCLAIMER: We will not ask about marriage or pregnancy, care responsibilities or disabilities in any of our job adverts or interviews. However, we do look to capture information about care responsibilities, and disabilities among other diversity information as part of an optional DEI Monitoring form to help us identify areas of improvement in our hiring process and ensure that the process is inclusive and non-discriminatory.