About the job
We are looking for a Principal 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 beyond self-driving vehicles. Our focus is on creating intelligent agents that can perceive, reason, move and manipulate the physical world across diverse embodiments, including mobile manipulators, dual-arm platforms and humanoids. This is a senior, high-impact role with genuine 0→1 ownership. You will help define the research agenda, technical strategy and foundations of a new robotics program, working alongside world-class researchers in foundation models, embodied intelligence and large-scale machine learning.
Responsibilities
Lead research into architectures, data and learning approaches for robot foundation models.
Design, implement and evaluate models such as VLAs, WAMs, omni-modal models, video models and related foundation-model architectures for robotics.
Explore and develop learning approaches including reinforcement learning, behavioural cloning and other methods relevant to robot policy development.
Synthesize, curate and filter large-scale video datasets for model training and evaluation.
Build and use scalable distributed training pipelines and infrastructure for large models and large datasets.
Influence and/or own technical decisions around robot policy development, data strategy and model design.
Collaborate closely with scientists, engineers and robotics teams to connect research progress to real-world robot performance.
Communicate research clearly internally and, where appropriate, contribute to external publications and Wayve’s scientific presence.
Qualifications
Minimum
Deep experience in machine learning, with focus in one or more of: vision-language models, video models, robot policies, foundation models for robotics or embodied AI.
Experience with scalable training, such as multi-node training, large datasets and/or large model training.
Strong research track record, including publications in top-tier venues such as ICRA, CoRL, CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML or ICLR.
Strong coding skills and hands-on experience with modern machine learning frameworks.
Ability to design and drive an independent research agenda while collaborating closely with engineering and robotics teams.
Experience translating research ideas into working systems, experiments or deployed capabilities.
Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical direction across teams.
Preferred
PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Vision or a related technical field.
5+ years of relevant industry experience.
Experience with real robots, robotic learning, embodied AI, simulation or policy learning.
Experience working with large-scale video data and sequential decision-making systems.
Experience mentoring researchers or leading technical workstreams.