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WayveSunnyvale
Site Reliability Engineering Manager (Vehicle Software)
On-siteFull Time$276.1k - $311.4k per yearPosted 2 days ago
About the role
- As SRE Manager, you’ll build the Vehicle Software SRE team from the ground up — defining its charter, hiring its founding engineers, establishing the operating model, and creating the technical strategy that makes reliability a first-class property of the software running on our vehicles
- You’ll work in a production environment unlike most: a globally distributed fleet of autonomous vehicles operating at the intersection of software, hardware, networking, sensors, and the physical world. Failures are often intermittent, hard to reproduce, and distributed across ownership boundaries. You’ll move reliability upstream — from reactive field support to prevention through architecture, automation, observability, and disciplined production readiness
- You’ll embed your team within Vehicle Software, partnering with product teams who retain ownership of what they build while your team provides the reliability engineering, standards, and leverage that help them operate fleet-critical software safely at scale. You’ll stay hands-on throughout — writing code, reviewing critical designs, and leading the investigations that matter most
- The systems you help harden will connect Wayve’s AI to physical vehicles and underpin the transition from engineering fleets to commercial operations. Few engineering leadership roles offer this combination of zero-to-one team building, deep systems work, and direct influence on the safety and scalability of autonomous mobility
- Team building & leadership :Build and lead a new SRE team from the ground up, staying hands-on as a player-coach on the team’s most consequential work
- Reliability strategy: Own technical direction for vehicle software reliability across deployment, service health, telemetry, and diagnostics; define what production-ready means at Wayve
- Production readiness: Define SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for fleet-critical workflows; drive release criteria, automated gates, rollback strategies, and fault-injection practices across Vehicle Software
- Observability & tooling: Design and implement the observability and automation that shortens the path from vehicle symptom to root cause, cuts the manual toil between failure and fix, and shapes systems for robustness, recoverability, and debuggability
- Incident response: Lead investigations into complex failures, ensure every incident produces a durable fix, and strengthen on-call practices and escalation paths across service-owning teams
- Mentorship & communication: Mentor engineers and emerging leaders, and give senior leadership the clarity on reliability health, risks, and investment they need to make good decisions
- What success looks like
- In the first 90 days, you have aligned the charter and ownership model, established a reliability baseline, mapped the highest-risk systems and workflows, defined the hiring plan, and personally contributed design, code, or tooling to deliver early reliability wins
- Within six months, the founding team is operating effectively inside priority Vehicle Software domains, with clearer service ownership, stronger observability, improved runbooks and escalation paths, and initial automated prevention and release controls in production; you remain a trusted technical contributor through design, coding, and code review
- Over 6-12 months, repeat incidents, mean time to detect, mean time to recover, and unowned escalations are trending down, while deployment success, vehicle readiness, data-collection reliability, and safe fleet availability are improving against the baseline
- Vehicle Software teams are increasingly able to own and operate their systems reliably, with SRE acting as a force multiplier rather than a permanent support queue Benefits
- Private healthcare: Choose our optional health insurance for comprehensive coverage for you and your family.
- Paid time off: Paid vacation plus public holidays and additional leave programs, ensuring you have time to unwind.
- Mental health resources: Through Spill, you can access therapy and mental health support.
- Community and socials: Join clubs or attend team socials to connect over hobbies, sports, or just for fun.
- Competitive compensation: Our compensation package includes cash and equity, making you a true partner in our success.
- Learning and development: Budgets for books, courses, and company-wide training to support your continuous growth.
- A track record of turning ambiguous, cross-functional problems into clear ownership, sequenced plans, and reliable delivery without relying on formal authority
- Calm and structured during incidents, with clear communication across software, hardware, operations, product, and executive stakeholders; a leadership approach grounded in ownership, blameless learning, and autonomy with accountability
- Hands-on experience building production software, automation, and diagnostic tooling in C++, Rust, Python, or Go, with familiarity with CI/CD, release systems, telemetry pipelines, and modern