Principal Architect
— United KingdomAbout 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
We're looking for a Principal Architect to define and drive the ‘north star’ architecture of our AI Portal Platform - enterprise grade platform that can scale to multiple OEM customers. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who thrives in early-stage, high-ambiguity environments and has a track record of taking products from MVP to scale. You'll work closely with engineering leads, product managers, and external partners to shape a platform that serves enterprise OEM customers worldwide.
This is a pivotal, high-impact role — we want someone who can bring clarity, structure, and strong technical judgment to a fast-moving, collaborative team.
What You'll Do
- Define and own the architecture of the AI Portal Platform — a cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS platform — ensuring scalability, resilience, security, and maintainability for enterprise-grade OEM deployments
- Drive architectural decisions across microservices, multi-tenancy, IAM, workflow orchestration, APIs, and large-scale data transfer pipelines
- Define scalable architectures for high-volume data ingestion, transfer, storage, and processing to support AI training, validation, and OEM fleet operations
- Define and enforce platform-wide Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), including scalability, availability, observability, disaster recovery, operational supportability, performance, and cost efficiency
- Lead security and compliance architecture aligned with enterprise and automotive standards, including secure-by-design principles, GDPR, ISO 27001, and auditability requirements
- Own and maintain Architectural Decision Records (ADRs), architecture documentation, system maps, and reference architectures
- Evaluate build-vs-buy trade-offs and guide technology selection across cloud, platform, and data infrastructure
- Influence cross-functional technical direction and align stakeholders across engineering, product, infrastructure, and data teams
- Mentor senior engineers and provide technical leadership to support platform evolution from MVP to a scalable enterprise SaaS ecosystem
What We're Looking For
Essential:
- Proven experience as a principal engineer or architect on a greenfield SaaS product, ideally taken from MVP to production scale
- Strong background in multi-tenant microservices architecture
- Hands-on experience with workflow engines (e.g., Temporal or equivalent)
- Experience with make vs. buy decision-making at an architectural level
- Comfortable working in mixed-mode environments (in-house teams + contractors)
- Excellent communication and influencing skills — able to align technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Experience working in a fast-paced, early-stage or scale-up environment
Nice to Have:
- Experience with data platform architecture (not a core requirement, but a plus)
- Familiarity with OEM or automotive industry processes (e.g., A-SPICE, TISAX)
- Experience with AI-powered tooling or integrations (Jira, Slack, Notion, etc.)
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.
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
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.
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