Site Reliability Engineering Manager, Vehicle Software

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.

THE ROLE

As SRE Manager, you'll build the Vehicle Software SRE team from the ground up — defining its charter, hiring its founding engineers, establishing the operating model, and creating the technical strategy that makes reliability a first-class property of the software running on our vehicles.

You'll work in a production environment unlike most: a globally distributed fleet of autonomous vehicles operating at the intersection of software, hardware, networking, sensors, and the physical world. Failures are often intermittent, hard to reproduce, and distributed across ownership boundaries. You'll move reliability upstream — from reactive field support to prevention through architecture, automation, observability, and disciplined production readiness.

You'll embed your team within Vehicle Software, partnering with product teams who retain ownership of what they build while your team provides the reliability engineering, standards, and leverage that help them operate fleet-critical software safely at scale. You'll stay hands-on throughout — writing code, reviewing critical designs, and leading the investigations that matter most.

The systems you help harden will connect Wayve's AI to physical vehicles and underpin the transition from engineering fleets to commercial operations. Few engineering leadership roles offer this combination of zero-to-one team building, deep systems work, and direct influence on the safety and scalability of autonomous mobility.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

- Team building & leadership :Build and lead a new SRE team from the ground up, staying hands-on as a player-coach on the team's most consequential work.

- Reliability strategy: Own technical direction for vehicle software reliability across deployment, service health, telemetry, and diagnostics; define what production-ready means at Wayve.

- Production readiness: Define SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for fleet-critical workflows; drive release criteria, automated gates, rollback strategies, and fault-injection practices across Vehicle Software.

- Observability & tooling: Design and implement the observability and automation that shortens the path from vehicle symptom to root cause, cuts the manual toil between failure and fix, and shapes systems for robustness, recoverability, and debuggability.

- Incident response: Lead investigations into complex failures, ensure every incident produces a durable fix, and strengthen on-call practices and escalation paths across service-owning teams.

- Mentorship & communication: Mentor engineers and emerging leaders, and give senior leadership the clarity on reliability health, risks, and investment they need to make good decisions.

ABOUT YOU

Essential

- 8+ years building and operating production software systems with strong depth in SRE, production engineering, platform engineering, embedded systems, or robotics, and a recent track record of writing production-quality code and leading architecture reviews across Linux-based, distributed, or hardware-software systems.

- 3+ years in people leadership with a track record of hiring, coaching, and growing engineers across levels while staying actively engaged in coding, design, and code review; experience forming a new team or capability from scratch is a strong plus.

- Proven experience with SLOs, error budgets, production-readiness standards, observability, incident management, postmortems, and toil-reduction programmes, with measurable outcomes to show for it.

- A track record of turning ambiguous, cross-functional problems into clear ownership, sequenced plans, and reliable delivery without relying on formal authority.

- H …