Software Engineer, Data Ingestion

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 Ingestion Systems Team

Our Ingestion Systems team sits within Wayve’s AI Platform organisation and builds the data foundations behind our self-driving technology. We process vast amounts of real-world driving data so it can be used for annotation, model training and evaluation. Operating at petabyte scale, the team focuses on making these critical data flows reliable, efficient and easy to operate.

🧠 Your day-to-day

• Debug and unblock failing ingestion pipelines, stalled jobs and processing queues
• Investigate corrupt, malformed or unexpected data from a variety of sources.
• Optimise Spark jobs and batch-processing pipelines for throughput, reliability and compute efficiency.
• Design and implement more resilient pipelines so individual bad data segments do not block wider workflows.
• Improve monitoring, retries and failure recovery across multi-step ingestion workflows.
• Help prioritise and unblock important datasets for downstream annotation, data science and model-training teams, and contribute to the technical direction of Wayve's ingestion platform.

🧩 What you’ll be working on

• High-volume pipelines that process real-world driving data for annotation, data science, model training and evaluation.
• Resilient systems that isolate problematic data rather than allowing a single bad segment to block a wider workflow.
• Orchestration across complex dependencies, queues, retries and priority data flows.
• Pragmatic improvements to the performance, cost and operability of our Spark-based data platform.
• Ingestion of varied data formats from partners, suppliers and other third-party sources.

🙌 You should apply if

• You have strong production experience with Apache Spark and Python.
• You have built, operated or debugged large-scale ingestion, ETL or distributed data-processing pipelines.
• You are comfortable diagnosing production failures involving corrupt data, stalled queues, retries and complex dependencies.
• You understand how to optimise high-throughput systems for reliability, performance and cost.
• You can learn an existing system quickly, work independently and deliver practical improvements in a fast-moving environment.
• Experience with Airflow, Flyte, Databricks, Delta Lake, Scala or Java would be an advantage.

🌱 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.

More about Wayve

🚀 Wayve is building the leading AI platform for autonomous driving. We are pioneering an end to end AI approach that enables vehicles to learn di
[…]
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.