Lead Technical Program Manager, Data

About us Founded in 2017, Wayve is the leading developer of Embodied AI technology. Our advanced AI software and foundation models enable vehicles to perceive, understand, and navigate any complex environment, enhancing the usability and safety of automated driving systems. Our vision is to create autonomy that propels the world forward. Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic AI products are designed for automakers, accelerating the transition from assisted to automated driving. In our fast-paced environment big problems ignite us—we embrace uncertainty, leaning into complex challenges to unlock groundbreaking solutions. We aim high and stay humble in our pursuit of excellence, constantly learning and evolving as we pave the way for a smarter, safer future. At Wayve, your contributions matter. We value diversity, embrace new perspectives, and foster an inclusive work environment; we back each other to deliver impact. Make Wayve the experience that defines your career! The role As the Lead Technical Program Manager for Data at Wayve, you'll build and lead the technical program management function for our Data org - the data platform, ingestion, standardisation pipelines, and the enrichment, curation, and labelling that fuel the AI Driver. The data corpus is also critical for teams working on simulation and validation. You'll be the delivery partner to engineering leadership for data teams and drive the department wide objective to “make valuable data immediately and reliably usable”. You will leading flagship programs yourself while supporting and coaching a small, high-impact TPM team. Your impact is measured in data quality, throughput, cost, and how predictably the data that powers every model lands. A successful TPM leader is a force multiplier - helping teams move faster, more effectively, and with purpose. Key Responsibilities Lead the function: Build, coach, and grow a small TPM team; hire to fill gaps and raise the bar. Own data delivery: Partner with Data leadership on planning, prioritisation, and execution across the data roadmap. Trusted partner for Engineering: You are a leader in the org. You will maintain the partnership with Engineering leaders to land big outcomes, pushing teams to land impact with high leverage and hold leaders to account. Drive flagship programs directly: Data platform, data pipelines, enrichment & curation, labelling / annotation, and dataset management and quality. Establish scalable practices: Planning cadences, governance, KPIs and dashboards, escalations and operational reviews. Align cross-functionally: Work with data, ML, engineering, and external data / annotation suppliers; manage dependencies, risk, and trade-offs. Connect to outcomes and represent the data org: Tie delivery to data quality, throughput, cost, and time-to-insight, and represent the data org in company-level reviews. About you In order to set you up for success as a Lead Technical Program Manager, Data at Wayve, we're looking for the following skills and experience. (The first four are our must-haves.) Essential 8+ years in data: Deep, hands-on experience delivering data programs as a technical program manager - data platform, pipelines, enrichment / curation, labelling - including people and process leadership. You've built or scaled a program function and you get things done with ownership and a bias for action. People leadership: You build, coach, and grow high-performing teams, and raise the bar on the craft. Technically strong: Credible with engineers on data platforms, pipelines, and large-scale data infrastructure, even though you won't write production code. Experience with distributed data platforms at Petabyte scale. Experience with data ingestion from raw data to processing through different stages and pipelines. Understands Directed Acyclic Graphs, their usage and challenges. Solid understanding of Machine Learning, GPUs and training and inference of 500M-20B parameter models. Proficient with som…