Principal Application Software Engineer

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

The Application SW team sits within Application Engineering in Product & Delivery. We bridge AI innovation and production vehicles, defining and executing the strategy for integrating Wayve’s autonomy stack into multiple OEM platforms, and working directly with automotive customers, including major Japanese OEMs.

🧠 Your day-to-day

As an Application SW Engineer, you’ll be responsible for the bring-up and early validation of our AI software stack on customer hardware platforms, ensuring it performs reliably across diverse SoCs and operating systems. You’ll work closely with Verification, Release and OEM partner teams to make integration smooth and delivery dependable. Your time will be split across platform bring-up and integration, customer and partner engagement, and technical leadership, including helping to build the team.

🧩 What you’ll be working on:

- Executing software bring-up on customer hardware platforms (e.g. NVIDIA Drive, Qualcomm Ride).

- Porting and configuring Linux-based systems, QNX and Adaptive AUTOSAR environments.

- Integrating and validating drivers, middleware and boot-time configurations.

- Working with Verification and Release teams to integrate hardware into CI/CD, HIL and test infrastructure.

- Working with OEM and Tier 1 teams to resolve hardware-specific integration issues.

- Implementing system-level diagnostics, logging and secure boot configuration.

- Developing automation for setup, flashing, health checks and test execution on target hardware.

- Defining and executing the strategy for integrating our autonomy stack into multiple OEM platforms.

- Building the team and providing technical leadership across integration work.

🙌 You should apply if:

Essential

- 8+ years of experience in embedded or automotive software development, ideally with hands-on platform bring-up experience.

- Strong proficiency in C/C++, Bash, and Python. Deep understanding of Linux-based embedded systems (Yocto, systemd, bootloaders, device trees).

- Familiarity with QNX and Adaptive AUTOSAR environments and the ability to configure and debug them on target hardware. Experience with bring-up on automotive-grade SoCs (e.g., NVIDIA Orin, Qualcomm SA8295/SA8650, Renesas, TI).

- Comfortable working with hardware debuggers, flashing tools, serial consoles, and board support packages (BSPs).

- Familiarity with communication protocols like CAN, Ethernet, PCIe, SPI, I2C.