Material Program Manager

Wayve

Wayve

Operations
Mountain View, CA, USA
Posted on May 2, 2024

Materials Program Manager

Who are we?

Our team is the first in the world to use autonomous vehicles on public roads using end-to-end deep learning. With our multi-national world-class technical team, we’re building things differently.

We don’t think it’s scalable to tell an algorithm how to drive through hand-coded rules and expensive HD maps. Instead, we believe that using experience and data will allow our algorithms to be more intelligent: capable of easily adapting to new environments.

Our aim is to be the future of self-driving cars: the first to deploy in 100 cities across the world bringing autonomy to everyone, everywhere.

The impact you will have

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

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 our London King’s Cross HQ, but we are open to discussing hybrid roles for the right candidate.

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.

Our offer:

  • Competitive compensation, on-site chef and bar, lots of fun socials, workplace nursery scheme, comprehensive private health insurance and more!
  • Immersion in a team of world-class researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs
  • A position to shape the future of autonomous driving, and thus bring about a real world deployment of a breakthrough technology.
  • Help relocating/travelling to London, with visa sponsorship
  • Flexible working hours - we trust you to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.

Wayve is built by people from all walks of life. We believe that it is our differences that make us stronger, and our unique perspectives and backgrounds that allow us to build something different. We are proud to be an equal opportunities workplace, where we don’t just embrace diversity but nurture it - so that we all thrive and grow.