Principal Data Engineer, Data Quality & Datasets Pipelines

The posting, as Wayve wrote it

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.

Here’s what this particular role covers.

🛠️ About our Datasets Team

Wayve’s Datasets team own the driving data that our AI Driver learns from, covering ingestion, annotation (automatic and manual), retrieval and data quality. Our data is growing from hundreds of petabytes towards exabyte scale, and not all of it is equally valuable for training. This team decides what we keep and where, and builds the systems that make those decisions work in practice.

🧠 Your day-to-day

• Implement and iterate filtering, retention and offload policies across hot, cold, archive and delete storage
• Build the data movement and pipelines that our pre-ingestion selection model depends on
• Decide where and how selection models run, balancing compute cost against data value
• Build early, low-compute decision points that avoid expensive standardisation and enrichment of low-value data
• Work with the storage and data infra teams, and monitor data quality to make sure our datasets reflect what model training needs

🧩 What you’ll be working on

• Turning our dataset strategy into working systems: moving, filtering, retaining and offloading driving data at hundreds of petabytes
• The engineering behind our pre-ingestion selection mode(s)l: how data moves, where the model runs and how offload policies work
• Delivering large, measurable storage-cost savings through early, low-compute decisions
• Making sure our datasets contain the most useful behavioural and environmental coverage for training. This is as much a data quality challenge as a software engineering one
• Working as a pair with our dataset strategy lead (who design and builds the models) and closely with the data infra team, shipping practical solutions quickly

👤 You should apply if

• You’re a senior data or software engineer who has run data ingestion or data quality pipelines at petabyte scale
• You’re strong in Python and Spark, with cloud data engineering experience
• You have good judgement on data filtering and quality, and know how to check you haven’t discarded valuable data
• You ship practical solutions quickly and are comfortable iterating on live systems
• You’re a software engineer at heart, building the systems around models rather than the models themselves
• You enjoy working closely with data infra and storage teams
• You bring experience in AV, robotics, fleet data or high-volume IoT, or with retention, offload and data lifecycle policies (a bonus rather than a requirement)

🌱 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.

Mor
[…]
annually
📈 Meaningful equity, sharing in the ownership and long term success of Wayve
✈️ Relocation support and visa sponsorship where applicable
✅ Hybrid working, core hours and the chance to work hands on in vehicle workshops and labs
📚 Learning and development budgets with support for training, conferences and growth
🩺 Comprehensive benefits including health insurance, dental, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, retirement or pension where applicable, access to therapists, wellbeing partner discounts and more

A quick, honest note before you apply.

Wayve is not a mature, fully-structured place with the playbook already written. Much of how we work is still being written, and if you join, you’ll help write it. That suits people who want real ownership more than people who need a settled structure from day one.

If that sounds like the kind of problem you want to spend your time on, we’d really like to hear from you.

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. https://wayve.ai/careers/ To learn more about what drives us, visit Values at Wayve https://wayve.ai/careers/

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.