Staff ML Engineer, Gaia

The role 

Gaia is Wayve’s video world model: trained on large-scale driving video, it predicts future frames from past context—functioning as a simulator that helps generate synthetic scenarios, including rare or safety-critical events. As a Staff ML Engineer on Gaia, you’ll own and drive work on training and improving frontier-scale models trained in-house. This is a high-impact role with the opportunity to tech-lead a key area and help shape the next version of Gaia in a fast-paced, results-focused environment.

Key responsibilities:

• Lead and execute large-scale training runs for video (or adjacent) foundation models, from experimental design through production-grade execution

• Contribute to model architecture and training strategy, using first-principles understanding rather than “off-the-shelf” application

• Improve world-model capabilities that enable synthetic scenario generation and downstream evaluation/training of the driving model

• Partner closely with research, applications, simulation engineering, and cloud/infrastructure teams to deliver end-to-end impact

• Provide technical leadership through mentorship, review, and setting high engineering/research standards (Senior/Staff scope)

About you  

In order to set you up for success as a Staff ML Engineer (Gaia) at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.

Essential

• In-depth experience training large-scale models (language, video, or other foundation models), including ownership of training at scale

• Strong understanding of model architecture and the ability to contribute meaningfully to architectural/training decisions

• Strong hands-on engineering skills with modern ML stacks (e.g., PyTorch), including debugging and performance/reliability-minded development

• Relevant industry experience (typically 4–5+ years); advanced degrees are valued, but depth of applied experience is important

Desirable

• Direct experience with world models, video generation, or long-horizon prediction

• Experience improving data/training pipelines and working across infrastructure constraints (distributed training, efficiency, reliability)

• Proven technical leadership (tech lead ownership, mentoring, setting direction across an area)

This is a full-time role based in our office in London.  At Wayve we want the best of all worlds so we operate a hybrid working policy that combines time together in our offices and workshops to fuel innovation, culture, relationships and learning, and time spent working from home.