Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Search & Index)

• We are hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for our Search & Indexing team

• The team is responsible for making Wayve’s massive corpus of multimodal video data discoverable and searchable

• This team builds the indexing infrastructure that powers vector-based and metadata-based retrieval

• This enables high-leverage workflows across data curation, training set construction, and ML research

• You’ll work closely with the Technical Lead and peers to scale and evolve the system that supports retrieval across hundreds of thousands of hours of driving data

• You’ll contribute to architectural decisions, own complex components, and help define best practices as the team grows

• You’ll play a key role in launching the next version of our indexing stack

• This will support basic similarity search and metadata filtering across hundreds of thousands of hours of video and sensor data

• The immediate focus is to move quickly

• You’ll leverage off-the-shelf tools, help inform build vs. buy decisions, and deliver an MVP system in months, not quarters

• This role requires someone who is comfortable with ambiguity, technically pragmatic, and able to make strong architectural decisions in imperfect conditions

• You’ll collaborate with ML teams, platform engineers, and downstream users to turn indexing from a bottleneck into a core capability

• Build and operate production search and indexing systems at billion-vector scale

• Apply and evaluate embedding models for semantic and multimodal retrieval, including inference, normalization, versioning, and integration

• Build evaluation frameworks to measure retrieval quality, recall, relevance, filtering accuracy, latency, freshness, scalability, and cost

• Develop backend services and APIs for vector similarity and metadata-filtered search

• Own search components from design and implementation through deployment and production operations

• Collaborate with ML, Data, and Evaluation teams to integrate search into training, curation, and evaluation workflows

• Support the growth of other engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, knowledge sharing, and mentoring

Benefits

• Private healthcare: Choose our optional health insurance for comprehensive coverage for you and your family.

• Paid time off: Paid vacation plus public holidays and additional leave programs, ensuring you have time to unwind.

• Mental health resources: Through Spill, you can access therapy and mental health support.

• Community and socials: Join clubs or attend team socials to connect over hobbies, sports, or just for fun.

• Competitive compensation: Our compensation package includes cash and equity, making you a true partner in our success.

• Learning and development: Budgets for books, courses, and company-wide training to support your continuous growth.- Strong understanding of multimodal embeddings and experience evaluating search quality across relevance, recall, filtering accuracy, and performance

• Experience building search services, APIs, and large-scale ingestion and indexing pipelines

• Strong coding skills in Python or other systems languages

• Experience with vector databases or ANN technologies such as FAISS, LanceDB, or similar open-source solutions

• Comfortable working across system boundaries (infra, ML, data curation)

• Experience delivering 0→1 systems in ambiguous or exploratory problem spaces

• 7+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or ML systems, building production systems

• Experience with large-scale ML pipelines or distributed data infrastructure

• Exposure to active learning, semantic retrieval, or training-data selection workflows

• Familiarity with multimodal data, including video, images, sensor data, and metadata

• Prior experience in autonomy, robotics, or large-scale data infrastructure

• Experience evaluating technical vendors and working with external technology providers