Materials Program Manager

Who we are

Established in 2017, Wayve is a leader in autonomous vehicle technology, driven by breakthroughs in Embodied AI. Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic technologies empower vehicles to navigate complex environments effortlessly. 

Supported by prominent investors, Wayve is advancing the transition from assisted to fully automated driving, making transportation safer, more efficient, and universally accessible. Join our world-class, multinational team of engineers and researchers as we push the boundaries of frontier AI and autonomous driving, creating impactful technologies and products on a global scale

Where you will have an impact

We’re looking for a strong Material program manager to work in our supply chain team. We are looking for someone who is passionate about working with engineers to bring early stage product development to scale and building outour supply chain to meet business needs. This role will need to build relationships with a number of suppliers and partners across a broad set of industries to negotiate favorable pricing and availability. It will also work with engineering to help guide the design for manufacturing at scale and help set up production lines and quality controls that enable that scale. 

This means you will:

• Work with Engineering, Operations, and Product teams across the company to craft and embed good engineering practises that work for Wayve, coaching teams where needed. We are building something different and this means we need to adapt and find ways of working to suit.
• Manage dependencies and report blockers to ensure smooth delivery across multi-disciplinary teams. 
• Working with engineering, help setup and manage suppliers. Own tracking of progress and coordination between parties and handoffs of tasks.
• Own the technical supply chain projects which enable our autonomous vehicle.
• Inform the budget management for the program, liaising with the engineers and supply chain team lead on how scope and timeline affect strategic decisions.
• Manage the CTB ("clear to build") process with suppliers, contract manufacturer, workshop team, and internal stakeholders, ensuring that we have efficient process and clear visibility on our procurement strategy

What you will bring to Wayve

Essential:

• Experience bringing newly developed products to scale through partner relationships
• Experienced project / programme manager with the ability to influence across multiple teams 
• Ability to do cost accounting for products and negotiate improvements with scale 
• Ability to drive decision making across a broad group of internal and external stakeholders.
• Experience in collaborative development between internal teams and external partners and suppliers
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to represent a broad range of tradeoffs and decisions to both working level teams and leadership.
• Comfortable working in an Agile program environment with aggressive milestones

Desirable:

• Autonomous Vehicle and Automotive Experience 
• Knowledge of Import and Export operations and regulations

You will be essential to Wayve’s mission, deeply enjoy what you do, take immense pride in being a small part of something big, and love pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

This role will be based in Mountain View, CA.

About you

• You have a track record of enabling multiple teams to work well together across functions and geographies, to deliver highly complex technical work.
• You have at least 5 years of experience working closely with multi-disciplinary technical teams to develop and ship products at an early stage of maturity.
• You are able to clearly communicate, and translate between product expectations and technical feasibility. You are comfortable presenting to senior stakeholders internally and externally.
• You are deeply curious about building something new and relish the idea of helping to define AV2.0 and how we build it.
• You consider yourself to have an optimistic and open-minded attitude towards solving problems and want to take on the challenge of AVs: the space-race of our generation!

This is our ideal candidate, but by no means the only candidate; we all have different strengths. If you don’t match 100% but believe you could do the job well, we would love to hear from you.

What we offer you

• The chance to be part of a truly mission driven organisation and an opportunity to shape the future of autonomous driving.  Unlike our competitors, Wayve is still relatively small and nimble, giving you the chance to make a huge impact
• Competitive compensation
• Fully employer-covered medical, dental and vision insurance!
• Further benefits such as catered lunch, yummy snacks, and variety of drinks, life insurance, employer contributed retirement account, therapy, yoga, office-wide socials and much more.
• A dynamic and fast-paced work environment in which you will grow every day - learning on the job, from the brightest minds in our space, and with support for more formal learning opportunities too
• A culture that is ego-free, respectful and welcoming (of you and your dog) - we even eat lunch together every day
• This is a full-time role based in our office in California. 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 also operate core working hours so you can be where you need to be for family and loved ones too.  Teams determine the routines that work best for them.

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 gender, gender identity, gender expression, race, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, ethnicity, age, religious belief, marital status, protected veteran status, or any other legally protected status.

DISCLAIMER: We will not ask about marriage or pregnancy, care responsibilities or disabilities in any of our job adverts or interviews. However, we do look to capture information about care responsibilities, and disabilities among other diversity information as part of an optional DEI Monitoring form to help us identify areas of improvement in our hiring process and ensure that the process is inclusive and non-discriminatory.