Software Engineer - Planner Frameworks Pipeline at Zoox (Foster City, CA)
Zoox· Foster City, CA· $177k–$270k·
Role details
Job description
Zoox is looking for an experienced software engineer to work on large-scale simulation pipelines used to validate the behavior of the Zoox self-driving vehicle. These are data and GPU intensive workloads built on Ray.io and Kubernetes. Given the massive scale and criticality of these pipelines, ensuring their reliability and efficiency has a significant impact on the company's ability to safely and quickly iterate on autonomy development. We are a small, scrappy team within the larger Autonomy organization. Although this role primarily involves off-vehicle pipelines, you will work closely with engineers developing the on-vehicle algorithms and models in our autonomy stack. We stay close to the end users - autonomy engineers - and think about the end to end use case for these validation pipelines. This is a hands-on role with a high degree of independence and ownership. You will be expected to contribute towards the framework’s architecture, reliability, efficiency, and grow its capabilities to support new use cases. You should have a track record of keeping production systems running with high availability. Experience with robotics or autonomous systems is not required but an understanding of the robotic data lifecycle is preferred.
In this role, you will:
- Improve the cost efficiency, reliability, and performance of our validation and simulation pipelines
- Create production-grade APIs, SDKs, and tools to enable a varied set of validations of autonomous behaviors
- Improve the ML training pipelines supporting the autonomous behavior org
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field and 6+ years of industry experience
- Experience optimizing large-scale distributed systems for cost and efficiency
-
Experience with AWS or similar providers
- Proficiency with Python and familiarity with C++
Bonus Qualifications
- Exposure to machine learning workloads (training, inference, data generation) from a cost optimization perspective
- Background in algorithmic optimization or performance investigation
- Experience with Ray.io, particularly Ray Core and Ray Data
Why work at Zoox
- Culture: Diverse, supportive community with inclusion‑focused strategy. Crew‑led groups for personal and professional development. Emphasis on trust, humility, and openness zoox.com/careers
- Work environment: Hybrid? The careers page lists many roles as “On‑site” in Foster City, CA, with other office locations available. In‑office perks include a famous food program with daily changing local and sustainable dishes, plus a busy calendar of events and sports teams.
- Benefits: Comprehensive health plans (Cigna), mental health support, wellbeing program, flexible time off, generous family planning and caregiver support, and a commitment to work‑life balance.
- Growth opportunities: Work on cutting‑edge autonomous vehicle technology alongside some of the brightest minds in AI, engineering, computer vision, and more. Offers internships and re‑entry programs (via Path Forward) for career returners.
- Recruitment process: Uses AI tools to assist in reviewing applications but final decisions are human. No fees are charged at any stage – watch for recruitment scams zoox.com/journal/landing-a-job-zoox