Senior Product Lifecycle Manager

Job description

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 Program Management Team

Wayve’s Program Management team turns complex technical goals into coordinated delivery. Working closely with engineering, product, safety and validation teams, we align priorities, manage dependencies and bring clarity to ambiguous challenges. We combine technical depth with cross-functional leadership to help teams move faster, more predictably and with purpose—focusing on meaningful outcomes rather than process for its own sake.

As Senior Product Lifecycle Manager, you’ll connect Wayve’s product milestones to the detailed technical plans, system-level artefacts and readiness evidence needed to deliver them. You’ll lead complex, multi-team programmes from one milestone to the next, ensuring teams work from a shared, credible plan across our Level 2 and Level 4 products.

🧠 Your day-to-day - Partner with engineering and product leads to translate product milestones into integrated cross-team schedules, priorities and delivery plans. - Review technical progress, backlog health, dependencies and system-level evidence to determine whether programmes are ready to move forward. - Identify technical risks and sequencing bottlenecks early, then drive the decisions and mitigation plans needed to protect delivery. - Facilitate difficult conversations around scope, resources and competing priorities, helping teams reach clear and practical decisions. - Adapt plans quickly as technical understanding, product priorities or delivery constraints change. - Communicate programme status, schedule changes, risks and decisions clearly and proactively across technical teams and senior stakeholders.

🧩 What you’ll be working on: - Owning and maintaining integrated lifecycle plans for complex Level 2 and Level 4 product milestones, creating a clear source of truth across teams. - Managing cross-team dependencies and critical-path activities across engineering, product, safety, verification and validation. - Managing system-level artefacts throughout the product lifecycle, ensuring the right information and evidence are available at each milestone. - Establishing clear milestone-readiness criteria and using technical status, metrics and backlog data to support evidence-based delivery decisions. - Aligning programme scope, sequencing and resource decisions with Wayve’s strategic and commercial priorities. - Improving lifecycle-planning practices and tooling so teams can identify risk earlier, coordinate more effectively and deliver with greater predictability.

🙌 You should apply if: - You have 5+ years of experience leading complex, multi-team technical or product programmes, with responsibility for planning, execution and delivery across several engineering teams. - You bring a strong background in the automotive or autonomous-vehicle industry and understand the complexity of delivering integrated vehicle and software products. - You have the technical depth to work closely with engineers, evaluate complex system architectures and challenge delivery plans constructively—not simply track execution. - You think in systems, understanding how technical decisions, dependencies and changes in one area affect downstream teams and product outcomes. - You’re decisive under uncertainty and can make sound prioritisation and trade-off recommendations with incomplete or evolving information. - You have a strong track record of identifying delivery, technical and dependency risks early and driving them through to resolution. - You use metrics, technical evidence and backlog health to assess readiness and guide programme decisions. - You’re product-minded and outcome-focused, connecting delivery decisions to customer value and business impact rather than process completion alone. - You can facilitate challenging stakeholder conversations, resolve conflicting technical priorities and create alignment without relying on formal authority. - You communicate clearly in writing and in conversation, tailoring complex programme information for both technical and business audiences. - You’re proficient with Jira, Confluence and modern backlog, planning and programme-management tools. - Experience working in a safety-critical, regulated or complex multi-stakeholder environment would be valuable. - A programme-management qualification such as PMP, CAPM or PRINCE2 would be a plus.

🌱 Not ticking every box? That’s totally okay! If you’re passionate about autonomy and keen to learn, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement.

More about Wayve:

🚀 Wayve is building the leading AI platform for autonomous driving. We are pioneering an end to end AI approach that enables vehicles to learn directly from real world experience, developing the ability to adapt, generalise and improve at scale. Instead of relying on hand coded rules or pre mapped environments, our AI Driver learns to drive by understanding the world around it. The result is technology that navigates complex urban environments with intelligence, precision and natural flow, unlocking meaningful advances in both safety and efficiency. We believe autonomy represents a once in a generation transformation in how people and goods move, comparable to the shift from horses to cars, and from human driven vehicles to intelligent machines.

Our ambition is to make autonomy universal. Wayve’s mapless and hardware agnostic AI platform integrates with global OEM partners, enabling continuous software evolution and unlocking advanced levels of automation from L2 plus through to L4 as our core AI model scales. In a race increasingly defined by intelligence and real world learning, Wayve is taking a distinct approach, building a generalisable driving intelligence that can power any vehicle, anywhere. By combining embodied AI with scalable deployment, we are creating technology that can be shaped to each OEM brand and driver experience, accelerating the transition to a safer, more intelligent future of mobility.

How we work 💻- Locations & Flexible Working:

This is a full-time role based in our London office.

Our main hubs are in London, Sunnyvale, Yokohama, Herzliya, Vancouver and Leonberg. We operate a hybrid working model that combines in-person collaboration in our dedicated office spaces with focused time working remotely. This gives our teams the connection and energy of working together, alongside the flexibility to do their best work in a way that fits their lives.

🔍 The Interview Process:

Our process is clear and respectful of your time: - Initial call / recruiter screen (30 minutes) - Competency Interviews (HM Call; 60 minutes) - Deep-dive technical interviews (Stakeholder Management, Delivery Use Case; 2 hours) - Final interview: mission & values alignment (45 minutes).

We’ll always explain the format and work around your availability.

What’s in it for you (Location dependant):

💰 Salaries benchmarked against the market annually ✅ Hybrid working, core hours and the chance to work hands on in vehicle workshops and labs 📚 Learning and development budgets with support for training, conferences and growth 🩺 Comprehensive benefits including health insurance, dental, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, retirement or pension where applicable, access to therapists, wellbeing partnerships, team socials and more

A quick, honest note before you apply.

Wayve is not a mature, fully-structured place with the playbook already written. Much of how we work is still being written, and if you join, you’ll help write it. That suits people who want real ownership more than people who need a settled structure from day one.

If that sounds like the kind of problem you want to spend your time on, we’d really like to hear from you.

At Wayve we're committed to creating a diverse, fair and respectful culture that is inclusive of everyone based on their unique skills and perspectives, and regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law.

For more information visit Careers at Wayve. https://wayve.ai/careers/ To learn more about what drives us, visit Values at Wayve https://wayve.ai/careers/

DISCLAIMER: We will not ask about marriage or pregnancy, care responsibilities or disabilities in any of our job adverts or interviews. However, we do look to capture information about care responsibilities, and disabilities among other diversity information as part of an optional DEI Monitoring form to help us identify areas of improvement in our hiring process and ensure that the process is inclusive and non-discriminatory.