Director of Platform Management for Simulation, Evaluation & Validation

The Role 

As Director of Platform Management for Simulation, Evaluation & Validation, you will lead the overall product vision and director for the platforms that Wayve uses to develop, evaluate, and validate the AI Driver. This includes open and closed loop simulation platforms, the evaluation test platform, synthetic data production, critical event pipelines, validation, and the workflows that connect them.

You will directly lead and indirectly influence sub team platform leads across Simulation, Evaluation, Data, and Validation to convert a complex set of cross-cutting initiatives into a single, opinionated product strategy. The job is part developer-tools PM (your users are engineers and scientists who will tell you immediately when something is slow, wrong, or in the way), part platform PM (your roadmap has to compose across simulators, datasets, evaluation, and triage), and part safety-systems PM (the outputs gate releases that put cars on real roads).

You will help shape and set vision for how our tools and services should function and work in an AV2.0 context - a Wayve-pioneered approach to both the driving stack and offline development.

Key Responsibilities

• Set product vision and strategy for the platforms. Define a multi-year, multi-quarter product strategy that takes Wayve from a collection of capable tools to a unified, opinionated platform for evaluating and validating the AI Driver. Anchor the strategy in measurable customer outcomes — developer velocity, signal quality, cost per evaluation, time-to-insight, validation credibility.

• Own the product roadmap end-to-end. Translate company-level priorities into a coherent roadmap across simulation, evaluation, and validation initiatives. Drive trade-offs between different internal and external customer groups. Ensure resourcing decisions are clearly communicated to other director level stakeholders.

• Lead and grow the team. Manage and mentor the product managers embedded across. Hire to fill gaps, level up the craft, and build a highly capable lean team.

• Build world class developer experiences. Run regular user research with Autonomy, Science, Validation, Release, and Product teams. Maintain a clear picture of what each customer segment needs from the platform, where the friction is, and which gaps are quietly bleeding velocity. 

• Define and defend quality bars for an internal platform. Set platform-wide standards for reliability, latency, cost per unit (per simulation, per evaluation, per enriched hour), self-service, observability, and API stability. Treat platform regressions the way a consumer team treats a churn spike.

• Establish regular operational cadences. Lead monthly business reviews and close the loop on requests and progress reporting with the leadership team. Lead quarterly planning, KPI reviews, and the trade-off conversations.

• Represent the platform externally. Help Wayve's leadership tell a credible story about how we develop and validate the AI Driver — to OEM partners, regulators, and at relevant industry forums.

About You  

In order to set you up for success at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.  

Essential 

• 0+ years of product management experience, with at least 3–5 years leading PM teams (PMs and/or senior PMs reporting to you).

• Track record building internal platforms, developer tools, or ML/AI evaluation infrastructure — products whose users are engineers and scientists, where the bar is set by power users with strong opinions and the ability to route around you if the tool isn't good enough.

• Data driven. You always seek to answer questions with data and lean into defining the right customer facing KPIs indicative of success

• Systems thinking across hardware, AI, and product. You understand how decisions in one part of the stack (data, simulator fidelity, metric design) propagate into outcomes (release confidence, on-road performance, regulator trust) elsewhere.

• Insight-driven leader. A record of producing the analysis or framing that changed a "go/no-go" decision on a complex AI or robotics program.

• Product craft. You care about workflows, latency, errors-per-hour, and how a tool feels. You apply product management best practices to measuring user experience.

• AI Fluency. You not only regularly use but are a standard bearer in the application of AI tools to the job.

Desirable 

• Prior experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or another safety-critical AI/ML program (L2+, L4, surgical robotics, aerospace autonomy, etc.).

• Familiarity with simulation, synthetic data, evaluation harnesses, or ML observability tools at production scale.

• Working knowledge of SOTIF (ISO 21448), ISO 26262, or other safety standards relevant to validating learned systems.

• Experience with internal developer platforms (CI/CD, ML platforms, data platforms) at scale.

This is a full-time role based in-office.  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. 

The reasonably estimated salary for this role ranges from $332,000 to $415,000, plus a competitive equity package. Actual compensation is based on the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience.  

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