Principal Research Scientist – Multimodal Reasoning & Embodied AI

Before the detail, here's the challenge you'd help us solve.

We build the embodied intelligence that moves real vehicles safely, and the ecosystem a billion machines will run on in the future. Very few people in AI can say this. Every role here, whatever the team, plugs into that.

Here’s what this particular role covers.

🛠️ About our Labs Team

Wayve Labs develops the next generation of learning capabilities for embodied AI, using autonomous driving as a demanding real-world testbed. Within FORGE, our Language & Reasoning team explores how LLMs, VLMs and VLAs can connect world knowledge, grounded reasoning, memory and planning to physical action. We work across model architectures, training and post-training, with the goal of helping driving agents generalise to new environments, follow goals and constraints, and handle rare situations. The team collaborates across London and Sunnyvale, with opportunities to publish fundamental research.

🧠 Your day-to-day

You will set and lead an ambitious research agenda at the intersection of LLMs, VLMs, VLAs and embodied AI, asking how agents can use world knowledge, visual understanding, memory and reasoning to make better decisions in the physical world.

You will remain hands-on: developing new architectures and learning methods, training and evaluating large-scale models, and testing whether better reasoning leads to better behaviour in challenging driving scenarios.

As a Principal Research Scientist, you will guide the technical direction of the team, mentor researchers, build strong collaborations with Engineering, an