Machine Learning Scientist/Engineer
Wayve, Sunnyvale, California USA
- Pay
- $311K–$420K / year
- Work type
- Hybrid
- Level
- Not stated
- Area
- ML / AI engineering, Inference & ML systems
- Posted
- Oct 2, 2026
Check my fit
See how your résumé lines up with this role: where you match, what's missing, and lines worth rewording.
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 Science Teams
We are looking for a Research Scientist to join the Multi-Embodiment Generalist Agent (MEGA) team within Wayve Science as a founding member. MEGA is building foundation models for general-purpose robots: models that learn from large-scale video, language, and robot-interaction data, then generalize across tasks and embodiments, including mobile manipulators, dual-arm platforms, and humanoids. Our aim is to build agents that can perceive, reason about, and act reliably in the physical world. You will help define and build the foundation-model learning stack for robotics: novel model architectures, pre-training objectives, post-training methods, and scalable data and training systems. The work combines frontier ML research with a direct route to real-world evaluation on a growing fleet of robots. Your work may span vision-language-action models, world and action models, video and multimodal models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and self-supervised learning. You will work with large-scale video and robotics datasets and distributed training infrastructure to develop increasingly capable, robust, and general robot policies. You will collaborate with research scientists, ML engineers, roboticists, and hardware teams to turn promising ideas into large-scale experiments, strong research contributions, and compelling robot demonstrations.
🧠 Your day-to-day
- Design and run experiments on model architectures, learning objectives and data strategies for robot foundation models.
- Build scalable pre-training and post-training methods using web video, egocentric video and robot-interaction data.
- Curate, filter, mix and evaluate large robotics datasets, including egocentric, UMI and teleoperated data.
- Develop and use distributed training pipelines for large multimodal models and datasets.
- Partner with ML engineers, roboticists and hardware teams to turn research progress into measurable real-world robot performance.
- Communicate findings through rigorous internal reviews, publications and robot demonstrations.
🧩 What you’ll be working on
- Research and develop model architectures, learning objectives, and data strategies for robot foundation models.
- Develop scalable self-supervised and generative pre-training methods using web video, egocentric video, and robot-interaction data.
- Develop post-training approaches, including supervised fine-tuning, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and related methods, to improve real-world robot capabilities.
- Curate, filter, and evaluate large-scale robotics datasets, including egocentric, UMI, and teleoperated data.
Similar roles at other companies
Pay not posted
Posted Jul 16, 2026
Research Scientist
Dyna RoboticsRedwood City, CA
$200K–$400K / yr
Posted Aug 22, 2025
$200K–$350K / yr
Posted Feb 25, 2026
Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Vision-Language Foundation Models
WaymoMountain View, California +1
$251K–$310K / yr
Posted Jul 23, 2026
Listed on Wayve's Ashby job board; checked 4 h ago. First seen by us 2 days ago. Being listed doesn't mean the team is actively interviewing. We found this board in a public directory and haven't yet confirmed it against the company's own careers page.