Lead Technical Program Manager, Quality & Compliance

The role

As the Lead Technical Program Manager for Quality & Compliance at Wayve, you'll build and lead the technical program management function that rolls out company-wide quality and compliance initiatives - spanning quality (including ASPICE), security, data privacy, and operational safety. This role reaches across the whole of Wayve: you'll turn complex, often heavyweight requirements into pragmatic, low-overhead processes that raise the bar without slowing the company down.

You'll lead flagship initiatives yourself while supporting and coaching a small, high-impact TPM team. Your impact is measured in how effectively Wayve meets its quality and compliance obligations - and how lightly those obligations sit on the organisation. A successful TPM leader is a force multiplier - helping teams move faster, more effectively, and with purpose.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the function: Build, coach, and grow a small TPM team; hire to fill gaps and raise the bar.

• Roll out company-wide compliance initiatives: Drive programs across quality (including ASPICE), security, data privacy, and operational safety - from framework to embedded practice.

• Trusted partner across Wayve: A leader in the org, you partner with engineering, product, safety, security, privacy / legal, and operations leaders to land outcomes and hold the bar - influencing without authority at every level.

• Make process simple and low-overhead: Design pragmatic, lightweight processes that meet the bar with minimal friction; negotiate must-haves vs nice-to-haves and find creative ways to meet long-standing requirements.

• Establish scalable practices: Governance, KPIs and dashboards, audit readiness, escalations and operational reviews.

• Align cross-functionally: Work across every part of Wayve - and external auditors / partners where relevant; manage dependencies, risk, and trade-offs.

• Connect to outcomes and represent Quality & Compliance: Tie delivery to compliance status, audit readiness, risk reduction, and organisational efficiency, and represent quality & compliance in company-level reviews.

About you

In order to set you up for success as a Lead Technical Program Manager, Quality & Compliance at Wayve, we're looking for the following skills and experience.

Essential

• 8+ years in quality / compliance / process programs: Deep, hands-on experience delivering quality, compliance, or process programs as a technical program manager - ideally spanning standards such as ASPICE, ISO, security, privacy, or safety - including people and process leadership. You've built or scaled a program function and you get things done with ownership and a bias for action.

• People leadership: You build, coach, and grow high-performing teams, and raise the bar on the craft.

• Pragmatic and creative: You negotiate must-haves vs nice-to-haves, and find creative ways to meet requirements that have long been done a certain way - keeping process simple and low-overhead rather than adding bureaucracy.

• Exceptional communicator & influencer: This role crosses all of Wayve; you communicate with unusual clarity and influence without authority at every level, bringing people along.

• Very good at process: You design simple, low-overhead processes that raise quality and keep the organisation efficient.

• Stays neutral and adapts under pressure: Effective in ambiguous, fast-moving environments; you flex your style and bring structure without slowing delivery.

• Systems thinking: You reason about how the parts of a complex organisation and its processes fit together, and how a change in one area ripples into others.

• Product-minded: You focus on outcomes and the people your programs serve - prioritising by impact and defining what good looks like, not just tracking activity.

• Raises the bar without the drag: You strengthen quality and compliance while keeping the organisation efficient and fast-moving.

• Strategic & business impact: You link quality and compliance investment to measurable outcomes - audit readiness, risk reduction, and efficiency.

• Data-informed: You steer with the right metrics and evidence, and set direction with clarity.

• Growth mindset: Open to feedback and always looking to improve.

Desirable

• Working knowledge of automotive / safety-critical or security / privacy standards - e.g. Automotive SPICE (ASPICE), ISO 26262, SOTIF (ISO 21448), ISO 27001, or GDPR / data privacy.

• Background in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or another regulated / safety-critical domain.

• An engineering or computer science degree, or experience working as an engineer.

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, with time spent working from home.