Principal Software Engineer, Robot Software

Overview

In this role, you’ll shape the Robot Software platform roadmap and lead high-impact initiatives that improve reliability and developer velocity across vehicle programs. You’ll align cross-functional interfaces among robotics, autonomy, simulation, and hardware teams, delivering observable, diagnosable systems at scale. You’ll mentor engineers and steer architecture decisions toward fleet-level outcomes. This is a hands-on leadership role at the core of Wayve’s autonomous driving platform, offering visibility into how software powers real-world vehicles.

Pay / Benefits

• salary benchmarked against market
• meaningful equity
• relocation support and visa sponsorship
• hybrid working model
• learning and development budgets
• comprehensive benefits including health insurance and wellbeing programs

Responsibilities

• Define and refine the Robot Software technical roadmap with leadership
• Lead cross-team platform initiatives from ambiguity to delivery
• Align architecture across Robot Software, Autonomy, Simulation, hardware, and OEMs
• Design observable, diagnosable, and maintainable systems across long-range operations
• Improve developer experience, validation, logging, metrics, deployment, and fault isolation
• Mentor senior engineers and drive evidence-based technical decisions
• Develop a unified robot-software platform supporting multiple vehicle types, compute platforms, and sensor packages
• Oversee application-framework and IPC approaches across internal and partner platforms
• Ensure reliable platform delivery for multiple programs and platforms
• Advance fleet observability, diagnostics, logging, and reliability metrics
• Pursue simulation and emulation to accelerate validation
• Implement portable build/deploy strategies across Jetson, DRIVE, Qualcomm, and partners
• Make cross-team technical decisions focused on reliability, performance, and velocity

Key requirements

• Led large technical initiatives across multiple engineering teams
• Ability to define architecture and strategy while debugging cross-domain problems
• Proficient with modern C++
• Experience in embedded, robotics, automotive, or similar complex systems
• Strong communication, trust-building, and consensus-building skills
• Focus on fleet-level outcomes like reliability, uptime, and deployment speed
• Comfort with balancing deep work and urgent technical leadership needs
• Experience with Linux/QNX, robotics middleware, platform integration, simulation, embedded compute, CI/CD, or large-scale fleet operations (valued)

• concise communication
• trust-building across teams
• ability to drive evidence-based decisions
• modern C++
• embedded systems
• robotics middleware

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