Research Scientist, Robot Foundation Models

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 Science Teams

We are looking for a Research Scientist to join the Multi-Embodiment Generalist Agent (MEGA) team within Wayve Science as a founding member. MEGA is building foundation models for general-purpose robots beyond self-driving vehicles. Our focus is on creating intelligent agents that can perceive, reason, move and manipulate the physical world across diverse embodiments, including mobile manipulators, dual-arm platforms and humanoids. This is a senior, high-impact role with genuine 0-to-1 ownership. You will help define the research agenda, technical strategy and foundations of a new robotics program, working alongside world-class researchers in foundation models, embodied intelligence and large-scale machine learning. You will have the opportunity to work across 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. Your day-to-day work may span vision-language-action models, world and action models, multimodal and omni models, video generation, reinforcement learning, imitation learning and behavioral cloning. You will collaborate closely with researchers, ML engineers, roboticists and hardware teams to move ambitious ideas rapidly from research hypotheses to large-scale experiments and impressive real-world capabilities.

🧠 Your day-to-day

• Research in architectures and data around robot foundation models.
• Implement and experiment with different models such as VLAs, WAMs, omni models, and video models.
• Implement and experiment with different learning approaches of the RL/BC kind.
• Synthesize and filter large video datasets.
• Build scalable distributed training pipelines and infrastructure.
• Influence and/or own robot policy development and data decisions.

🧩 What you’ll be working on

• Lead research into architectures, data and learning approaches for robot foundation models.
• Design, implement and evaluate models such as VLAs, WAMs, omni-modal models, video models and related foundation-model architectures for robotics.
• Explore and develop learning approaches including reinforcement learning, behavioural cloning and other methods relevant to robot policy development.
• Synthesize, curate and filter large-scale video datasets for model training and evaluation.
• Build and use scalable distributed training pipelines and infrastructure for large models and large datasets.
• Influence and/or own technical decisions around robot policy development, data strategy and model design.
• C

[…]
ly
📈 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 partnerships, team socials 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.