The role
Key responsibilities:
Lead day-to-day customer interactions in Japan, building strong, trusted relationships across product, engineering and leadership stakeholders.
Bridge the time-zone and communication gap between Japan and Wayve's global teams, ensuring fast, clear and accurate flow of information in both directions.
Lead local development efforts in Japan and drive close partnership with our global engineering teams, scoping, prioritising and shipping the features and fixes that matter most to our customers.
Set the technical and product direction for the Japan-based team, growing local engineering and product capability over time as the customer base scales.
Translate customer feedback, technical questions and market context into actionable product requirements and clear input to the roadmap.
Drive issue triage and resolution end-to-end, owning customer-facing communication and ensuring rapid, technically sound responses.
Represent Wayve in customer meetings, technical reviews and on-site visits with a credible technical voice.
About you
In order to set you up for success as a Product Manager at Wayve, we’re looking for the following skills and experience.
Essential :
Strong technical background (engineering, computer science, robotics, automotive or similar) with the ability to engage credibly on deep technical topics.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills in both English and Japanese, comfortable presenting to senior stakeholders.
Proven track record in product management, technical program management or a customer-facing technical role, ideally on complex software or hardware-software products.
Demonstrated leadership and ability to influence without authority across cross-functional, cross-geography teams.
High autonomy and strong ownership — comfortable operating independently from HQ, across time zones, and driving outcomes with minimal oversight.
Desirable
Experience in automotive, ADAS, autonomous driving or other safety-critical product domains.
Prior experience working with Japanese OEMs or Tier-1 suppliers.
Background working across global teams (Japan ↔ Europe / US) in a startup or scale-up environment.
This is a full-time role based in our office in Yokohama / Tokyo, Japan. 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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