Senior Backend/ML Systems Engineer – Search & Indexing Platform (Billion-Scale Vector Databases)

wayve • United State

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AI Summary

Design, build, and scale a production-grade search and indexing platform for multimodal driving data (videos, sensor data) at billion-vector scale. Lead architecture, ingestion pipelines, and retrieval systems while collaborating with ML, data, and platform teams to enhance Wayve’s autonomous driving AI ecosystem. Own end-to-end systems from MVP development to vendor evaluation and mentorship in a fast-paced, 0→1 environment.

Key Highlights

First hire in Wayve’s Search & Indexing team, shaping a billion-vector-scale platform for multimodal driving data

Own architecture, backend services, and APIs for vector similarity, semantic retrieval, and metadata-filtered search

Evaluate and integrate embedding models, vector databases (e.g., FAISS), and external vendors while measuring retrieval quality, latency, and scalability

Key Responsibilities

Design and build production search and indexing systems capable of handling 10B+ vectors from multimodal driving data (videos, sensor data, embeddings, metadata)

Develop ingestion and indexing pipelines for large-scale data processing, ensuring scalability, freshness, and low-latency retrieval

Architect and implement backend services/APIs for vector similarity, semantic retrieval, and metadata-filtered search with high performance and accuracy

Evaluate and integrate embedding models, vector databases (e.g., FAISS, LanceDB), and third-party ANN libraries while optimizing for recall, relevance, filtering accuracy, and cost

Collaborate with ML, Data, and Platform teams to integrate search into training-set construction, data curation, and research workflows

Mentor engineers through code reviews and guide the team on best practices for 0→1 system development in ambiguous problem spaces

Work cross-functionally with Technical Lead to define system architecture and prioritize build vs. buy decisions for components

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Technical Skills Required

Backend Systems Engineering Vector Databases & Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) Technologies Python

Benefits & Perks

Market-benchmarked annual salaries

Meaningful equity with long-term ownership potential

Relocation support and visa sponsorship where applicable

Hybrid working model with core hours and on-site collaboration

Comprehensive benefits including health insurance, dental, parental leave, retirement, and wellness programs

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Nice to Have

Experience with large-scale ML pipelines or distributed data infrastructure

Multimodal data handling (video, images, sensor data, metadata)

Active learning, semantic retrieval, or training-data selection workflows

Autonomy, robotics, or large-scale data infrastructure expertise

Evaluating technical vendors and managing external provider relationships

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.The Search & Indexing team, part of Compute and Data Platform (AI Platform), makes Wayve's multimodal driving data discoverable. We build the indexing infrastructure behind vector and metadata-based retrieval, powering data curation, training set construction and ML research. You'd be the first hire in the team, in our Sunnyvale office.

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