Senior Product Lifecycle Manager

🧠 Your day-to-day

• Partner with engineering and product leads to translate product milestones into integrated cross-team schedules, priorities and delivery plans.

• Review technical progress, backlog health, dependencies and system-level evidence to determine whether programmes are ready to move forward.

• Identify technical risks and sequencing bottlenecks early, then drive the decisions and mitigation plans needed to protect delivery.

• Facilitate difficult conversations around scope, resources and competing priorities, helping teams reach clear and practical decisions.

• Adapt plans quickly as technical understanding, product priorities or delivery constraints change.

• Communicate programme status, schedule changes, risks and decisions clearly and proactively across technical teams and senior stakeholders.

🧩 What you’ll be working on

• Owning and maintaining integrated lifecycle plans for complex Level 2 and Level 4 product milestones, creating a clear source of truth across teams.

• Managing cross-team dependencies and critical-path activities across engineering, product, safety, verification and validation.

• Managing system-level artefacts throughout the product lifecycle, ensuring the right information and evidence are available at each milestone.

• Establishing clear milestone-readiness criteria and using technical status, metrics and backlog data to support evidence-based delivery decisions.

• Aligning programme scope, sequencing and resource decisions with Wayve’s strategic and commercial priorities.

• Improving lifecycle-planning practices and tooling so teams can identify risk earlier, coordinate more effectively and deliver with greater predictability.

🙌 You should apply if

• You have 5+ years of experience leading complex, multi-team technical or product programmes, with responsibility for planning, execution and delivery across several engineering teams.

• You bring a strong background in the automotive or autonomous-vehicle industry and understand the complexity of delivering integrated vehicle and software products.

• You have the technical depth to work closely with engineers, evaluate complex system architectures and challenge delivery plans constructively—not simply track execution.

• You think in systems, understanding how technical decisions, dependencies and changes in one area affect downstream teams and product outcomes.

• You’re decisive under uncertainty and can make sound prioritisation and trade-off recommendations with incomplete or evolving information.

• You have a strong track record of identifying delivery, technical and dependency risks early and driving them through to resolution.

• You use metrics, technical evidence and backlog health to assess readiness and guide programme decisions.

• You’re product-minded and outcome-focused, connecting delivery decisions to customer value and business impact rather than process completion alone.

• You can facilitate challenging stakeholder conversations, resolve conflicting technical priorities and create alignment without relying on formal authority.

• You communicate clearly in writing and in conversation, tailoring complex programme information for both technical and business audiences.

• You’re proficient with Jira, Confluence and modern backlog, planning and programme-management tools.

• Experience working in a safety-critical, regulated or complex multi-stakeholder environment would be valuable.

• A programme-management qualification such as PMP, CAPM or PRINCE2 would be a plus.

🌱 Not ticking every box? That’s totally okay! If you’re passionate about autonomy and keen to learn, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement.