Principal Architect

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.