Principal Engineer, 3D Reconstruction

Partner with calibration, sensor fusion, perception, data, infrastructure, and validation teams to align requirements, resources and ownership boundaries.

Set technical standards for reconstruction quality, failure analysis, uncertainty measurement, and dataset suitability and execute strategies to validate them

Mentor and provide technical leadership to engineers contributing to the 3D reconstruction effort.

Communicate technical tradeoffs, limitations, and progress clearly to engineering leaders and cross-functional stakeholders.

Required Skills/Experience

Deep technical expertise in SLAM, 3D reconstruction, mapping, state estimation, or closely related robotics/perception fields.

Strong hands-on experience with lidar-based reconstruction, point-cloud registration, pose estimation, and real-world robotics sensor data.

Experience building offline reconstruction, mapping, or perception systems that operate on large volumes of sensor data.

Strong software engineering skills in C++, Python, or similar robotics/perception environments.

Experience taking research or prototype algorithms into reliable production systems.

Comfortable defining technical strategy, roadmaps, and milestones in ambiguous problem spaces

Strong cross-functional technical leadership in ambiguous, multi-team environments.

Clear communication of algorithmic tradeoffs, limitations, confidence, and failure modes to technical and cross functional stakeholders.

Systems-level understanding of sensor calibration, timing, synchronization and quality issues, and ability to define requirements and work with specialist teams to achieve them

Desired Skills/Experience

MS/PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, State Estimation, Sensor Fusion, SLAM, 3D Reconstruction, or a related technical field; or equivalent practical experience.

Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, mapping, or ground-truth data pipelines in a production setting.

Experience with GNSS/INS fusion, sensor based odometry, or other high-accuracy position estimation approaches

Experience with nonlinear optimization techniques such as pose graph optimization, factor graphs, bundle adjustment, ICP etc

Experience apply modern machine learning approaches to 3D reconstruction, mapping, or scene understanding, including foundation models or learned 3D representations

Familiarity with robotics tooling such as ROS, PCL, OpenCV, CUDA, or similar.

Familiarity with ML data enrichment, autolabelling, annotation workflows, or validation-data generation.

Experience designing quality metrics, validation evidence, or credibility arguments for reconstructed data.

Experience leading small expert technical teams from early-stage concept to production use.

This role is a full-time role based in Sunnyvale.

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. We operate core working hours so you can determine the schedule that works best for you and your team.

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We understand that everyone has a unique set of skills and experiences and that not everyone will meet all of the requirements listed above. If you’re passionate about self-driving cars and think you have what it takes to make a positive impact on the world, we encourage you to apply. 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.

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