Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Index
$312k - $351k • Sunnyvale, California USA • Full-time
Posted 26d ago
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
Full-time
Categories
Machine Learning Engineer
About the job
Wayve is building the leading AI platform for autonomous driving, pioneering an end-to-end AI approach that enables vehicles to learn directly from real-world experience. This role is within the Search & Indexing team, part of the Compute and Data Platform (AI Platform), responsible for making Wayve's multimodal driving data discoverable. The team builds indexing infrastructure for vector and metadata-based retrieval, powering data curation, training set construction, and ML research. You will be the first hire in this team, based in our Sunnyvale office.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate the search and indexing platform for large-scale video and sensor data, scaling beyond 10 billion vectors.
- Develop ingestion and indexing pipelines for video, sensor data, embeddings, and metadata.
- Create backend services and APIs for vector similarity, semantic retrieval, and metadata-filtered search.
- Evaluate and integrate embedding models, vector databases, ANN libraries, and external vendors.
- Develop evaluation frameworks to measure retrieval quality, recall, relevance, filtering accuracy, latency, freshness, scalability, and cost.
- Integrate search functionalities into training-set construction, data curation, and research workflows.
- Collaborate with ML, Data, Evaluation, and Platform teams.
- Mentor and support other engineers through code reviews.
Requirements
- 7+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or ML systems, with a focus on building production systems.
- Hands-on experience with vector databases or ANN technologies (e.g., FAISS, LanceDB).
- Understanding of multimodal embeddings and experience evaluating search quality across relevance, recall, filtering accuracy, and performance.
- Strong coding skills in Python or another systems language.
- Experience building search services, APIs, and large-scale ingestion and indexing pipelines.
- Proven ability to deliver 0-to-1 systems in ambiguous problem spaces.
- Comfort working across infrastructure, ML, and data curation domains.
Benefits
- Salaries benchmarked against the market annually
- Meaningful equity
- Relocation support
- Visa sponsorship
- Hybrid working
- Core working hours
- Learning and development budgets
- Support for training and conferences
- Comprehensive health insurance
- Dental insurance
- Enhanced maternity and paternity leave
- Retirement or pension contributions
- Access to therapists
- Wellbeing partnerships
- Team socials