Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Index at Wayve

Department: AI Platform

Compensation

$311,850 – $350,625/yr

Setup: Hybrid
Location: Sunnyvale, California
Type: Full-time
Level: senior
Posted: Sep 1, 2026

Description

Wayve is hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for its Search & Indexing team to build and operate production search and indexing systems at billion-vector scale. The role focuses on vector-based and metadata-based retrieval across multimodal video and sensor data, including embedding models, search APIs, evaluation frameworks, ingestion pipelines, and production operations. The engineer will own complex components, make architectural decisions, collaborate with ML, data, and platform teams, and mentor other engineers. The position is full-time and hybrid in Sunnyvale, California, with an estimated salary of $311,850 to $350,625 plus competitive equity.

Required Skills

Vector databases
ANN technologies
Multimodal embeddings
Python
Search services
APIs
Indexing pipelines
Production operations

Additional Information

Required Previous Experiences: 7+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or ML systems building production systems
Experience with vector databases or ANN technologies such as FAISS, LanceDB, or similar open-source solutions
Experience evaluating search quality across relevance, recall, filtering accuracy, and performance
Experience building search services, APIs, and large-scale ingestion and indexing pipelines
Experience delivering 0→1 systems in ambiguous or exploratory problem spaces
Experience working across infrastructure, machine learning, and data curation boundaries
Preferred Qualifications: Experience with large-scale ML pipelines or distributed data infrastructure
Familiarity with multimodal data, including video, images, sensor data, and metadata
Exposure to active learning, semantic retrieval, or training-data selection workflows
Prior experience in autonomy, robotics, or large-scale data infrastructure
Experience evaluating technical vendors and working with external technology providers