The Role
We're looking for a Principal Architect to define and drive the ‘north star’ architecture of our AI Portal Platform - enterprise grade platform that can scale to multiple OEM customers. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who thrives in early-stage, high-ambiguity environments and has a track record of taking products from MVP to scale. You'll work closely with engineering leads, product managers, and external partners to shape a platform that serves enterprise OEM customers worldwide.
This is a pivotal, high-impact role — we want someone who can bring clarity, structure, and strong technical judgment to a fast-moving, collaborative team.
What You'll Do
Define and own the architecture of the AI Portal Platform — a cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS platform — ensuring scalability, resilience, security, and maintainability for enterprise-grade OEM deployments
Drive architectural decisions across microservices, multi-tenancy, IAM, workflow orchestration, APIs, and large-scale data transfer pipelines
Define scalable architectures for high-volume data ingestion, transfer, storage, and processing to support AI training, validation, and OEM fleet operations
Define and enforce platform-wide Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), including scalability, availability, observability, disaster recovery, operational supportability, performance, and cost efficiency
Lead security and compliance architecture aligned with enterprise and automotive standards, including secure-by-design principles, GDPR, ISO 27001, and auditability requirements
Own and maintain Architectural Decision Records (ADRs), architecture documentation, system maps, and reference architectures
Evaluate build-vs-buy trade-offs and guide technology selection across cloud, platform, and data infrastructure
Influence cross-functional technical direction and align stakeholders across engineering, product, infrastructure, and data teams
Mentor senior engineers and provide technical leadership to support platform evolution from MVP to a scalable enterprise SaaS ecosystem
What We're Looking For
Essential:
Proven experience as a principal engineer or architect on a greenfield SaaS product, ideally taken from MVP to production scale
Strong background in multi-tenant microservices architecture
Hands-on experience with workflow engines (e.g., Temporal or equivalent)
Experience with make vs. buy decision-making at an architectural level
Comfortable working in mixed-mode environments (in-house teams + contractors)
Excellent communication and influencing skills — able to align technical and non-technical stakeholders
Experience working in a fast-paced, early-stage or scale-up environment
Nice to Have:
Experience with data platform architecture (not a core requirement, but a plus)
Familiarity with OEM or automotive industry processes (e.g., A-SPICE, TISAX)
Experience with AI-powered tooling or integrations (Jira, Slack, Notion, etc.)
This is a full-time role based in our office in London. 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.