SRE Manager, Vehicle Software

📋 Job Overview

Before the detail, here's the challenge you'd help us solve. We build the embodied intelligence that moves real vehicles safely, and the ecosystem a billion machines will run on in the future. Very few people in AI can say this. Every role here, whatever the team, plugs into that.

🏢 About Wayve

Wayve is building the leading AI platform for autonomous driving. We are pioneering an end to end AI approach that enables vehicles to learn directly from real world experience, developing the ability to adapt, generalise and improve at scale. Instead of relying on hand coded rules or pre mapped environments, our AI Driver learns to drive by understanding the world around it. The result is technology that navigates complex urban environments with intelligence, precision and natural flow, unlocking meaningful advances in both safety and efficiency. We believe autonomy represents a once in a generation transformation in how people and goods move, comparable to the shift from horses to cars, and from human driven vehicles to intelligent machines.

Our ambition is to make autonomy universal. Wayve’s mapless and hardware agnostic AI platform integrates with global OEM partners, enabling continuous software evolution and unlocking advanced levels of automation from L2 plus through to L4 as our core AI model scales. In a race increasingly defined by intelligence and real world learning, Wayve is taking a distinct approach, building a generalisable driving intelligence that can power any vehicle, anywhere. By combining embodied AI with scalable deployment, we are creating technology that can be shaped to each OEM brand and driver experience, accelerating the transition to a safer, more intelligent future of mobility.

🎯 The Role

Here’s what this particular role covers.

🛠️ About our SRE Engineering Teams
Our SRE teams build the software that brings Wayve’s autonomous-driving technology onto real vehicles. Their work connects onboard compute, sensors, networking, fleet operations and requires systems that can be deployed, monitored and recovered reliably as we expand across vehicle platforms and markets.

🧠 Your day-to-day
Interview, onboard and coach engineers, setting clear expectations and supporting their performance and career growth.
Work with engineering managers and technical leads to review reliability risks, agree on ownership and prioritize the team’s work.
Stay hands-on by designing solutions, writing production code and reviewing critical changes alongside your team.
Lead technical investigations and incident reviews, turning findings into concrete fixes and follow-up work.
Coordinate focused projects with Vehicle Software teams, helping them improve reliability while retaining ownership of their systems.
Review reliability metrics and roadmap progress, adjusting priorities to reflect product milestones, fleet needs and operational risk.
Communicate technical decisions, trade-offs and results to engineering and company leaders.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Building the Vehicle Software SRE team from the ground up, including its charter, team structure, hiring plan, operating model and technical strategy.
• Reliability foundations for onboard software and the workflows that deploy, configure, start, monitor and recover it across vehicle platforms and markets.
• Service-level indicators and objectives, error budgets and production-readiness standards that give teams clear measures of system health and release readiness.
• Observability, health signals and diagnostic tools that help engineers understand failures across onboard compute, sensors, networking and vehicle data.
• Safer deployment and recovery through automated validation, release gates, smoke tests, rollback mechanisms and resilience testing.
• Incident-response workflows, runbooks, escalation paths and sustainable on-call practices that reduce repeat failures and speed up recovery.
• Automation and self-service tools that reduce manual operational work and help vehicle operations scale.

🙌 You should apply if

• You have 3+ years of engineering-management experience, with direct responsibility for hiring, performance management, coaching and career development.
• You have 8+ years of experience building or operating complex production software, with depth in SRE, production engineering, platform engineering, embedded systems or a related field.
• You have built or substantially reshaped an engineering team or capability, setting technical direction across teams, clarifying ownership and aligning partners around difficult trade-offs to deliver measurable results.
• You still write production-quality code, design systems and lead substantive code reviews. You have a strong technical judgment across Linux and distributed systems.
• You have applied SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident management and release-safety practices to deliver measurable improvements—not just restore service when something breaks.
• You build an inclusive team culture with clear accountability, thoughtful feedback and blameless learning from incidents.
• You have a degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Bonus points if you have experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, automotive or other safety-critical systems.

🌱 Not ticking every box? That’s totally okay! If you’re passionate about autonomy and keen to learn, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement.

🎁 Benefits

Compensation: $276,100 – $293,750 • Offers Equity

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

How we work 💻- Locations & Flexible Working:
Our main hubs are in London, Sunnyvale, Yokohama, Herzliya, Vancouver and Leonberg. We operate a hybrid working model that combines in-person collaboration in our dedicated office spaces with focused time working remotely. This gives our teams the connection and energy of working together, along with the flexibility to focus and recharge.