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Wayve is seeking a Principal Research Scientist to join the Multi-Embodiment Generalist Agent (MEGA) team as a founding member. This is a senior, high-impact role with genuine 0-to-1 ownership in building foundation models for general-purpose robots beyond self-driving vehicles.
You will help define the research agenda and technical strategy for a new robotics program, working alongside world-class researchers in foundation models, embodied intelligence, and large-scale machine learning. The role spans the entire robot-learning stack: building scalable data flywheels, developing new model architectures and learning algorithms, training large models, designing rigorous evaluations, and deploying policies on real robots.
Day-to-day responsibilities include:
- Leading research into architectures, data, and learning approaches for robot foundation models
- Implementing and experimenting with vision-language-action models (VLAs), world and action models (WAMs), omni-modal models, and video models
- Exploring reinforcement learning, behavioral cloning, and other policy development methods
- Synthesizing, curating, and filtering large-scale video datasets for training and evaluation
- Building and maintaining scalable distributed training pipelines and infrastructure
- Influencing and owning technical decisions around robot policy development, data strategy, and model design
- Collaborating closely with scientists, engineers, and robotics teams to connect research to real-world robot performance
- Communicating research internally and contributing to external publications
Wayve is building the leading AI platform for autonomous driving using an end-to-end AI approach. The company is now expanding into general-purpose robotics, leveraging its expertise in embodied AI and scalable learning. The role offers the opportunity to shape a new research program from the ground up.
The company operates a hybrid model with main hubs in London, Sunnyvale, Yokohama, Herzliya, Vancouver, and Leonberg. Core hours and flexibility to work remotely are supported, with hands-on access to vehicle workshops and labs.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Deep experience in machine learning, with focus on one or more of: vision-language models, video models, robot policies, or foundation models for robotics/embodied AI
- Experience with scalable training (multi-node training, large datasets, large model training)
- Strong research track record with publications in top-tier venues (ICRA, CoRL, CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR)
- Strong coding skills and hands-on experience with modern machine learning frameworks
- Ability to design and drive an independent research agenda while collaborating with engineering and robotics teams
- Experience translating research ideas into working systems, experiments, or deployed capabilities
- Strong communication skills and ability to influence technical direction across teams
Note: The posting encourages applications from those passionate about autonomy even if not meeting every requirement.
