Senior Software Engineer - Runtime Platform, Robot Software

About the role

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 Engineering Teams

Wayve’s Robot Software team builds the software that runs across our internal vehicle fleet, enabling autonomous driving and collecting the data used to train new driving models. We deliver a reliable, stable, and flexible software stack that allows model developers and scientists to run on-road experiments, iterate quickly, and bring new autonomous-driving capabilities to life.

The Runtime Platform team owns the shared foundations that the onboard software stack depends on: application frameworks, communication middleware, application lifecycle management, system health monitoring, performance, and observability. We build reusable runtime capabilities that help engineering teams develop and operate reliable software across different vehicles, operating systems, and compute platforms.

As a Software Engineer, Runtime Platform, you’ll develop shared runtime software, investigate end-to-end performance, and help guide architectural decisions across Robot Software. Your work will help the onboard stack meet its latency, throughput, reliability, and resource requirements as it evolves and moves onto new platforms.

🧠 Your day-to-day

- Design, build, and maintain shared onboard application frameworks and developer interfaces.

- Develop application lifecycle management, health monitoring, fault reporting, and runtime diagnostics.

- Evolve Wayve’s communication middleware by evaluating technologies, migrating components, and supporting new operating systems and compute platforms.

- Investigate latency and performance bottlenecks across the full onboard software stack.

- Instrument software with profiling tools and metrics to identify optimisation opportunities.

- Collaborate with engineering teams to understand performance pain points and prioritise improvements by impact.

- Work with internal teams and middleware suppliers to resolve integration issues and establish shared APIs, documentation, and best practices.

🧩 What you’ll be working on

- Shared runtime services and application frameworks used across Robot Software.

- Communication middleware and high-throughput, low-latency inter-process communication.

- Application lifecycle, system health monitoring, fault reporting, and runtime resource management.

- End-to-end profiling across OS scheduling, memory hierarchy, CPU caches, context switching, thread synchronisation, and critical code paths.

- New profiling and instrumentation tools for benchmarking system performance and establishing baselines.