Head of Model Validation & Behavioral AI for Autonomy

Zoox; Foster City, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 237,000 - 338,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Zoox Stock Appreciation Rights

Amazon RSUs

Health Insurance

Sign-on bonus potential

Job summary

Zoox is seeking a Manager of Model Validation & Verification for Behavior Autonomy to lead an engineering and data science team evaluating and benchmarking ML models and behavioral algorithms for autonomous vehicle stacks.

You will own validation pipelines, offline/online evaluation metrics, and data-driven release criteria in collaboration with Autonomy Software, Prediction, Planner, and ML Ops teams.

Qualifications

• Masters or PhD in CS, Robotics, Applied Statistics or a related field.
• 7+ years of technical experience in robotics, autonomous systems, or AI/ML.
• 3+ years of direct engineering management experience leading DS/ML/V&V teams.
• Strong background in ML model validation and evaluation frameworks.
• Experience with large-scale production codebases.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and scale a high-performing team of Data Scientists, ML Validation Engineers, and Software Engineers.
• Define and execute end-to-end validation strategies across offline evaluation, open/closed-loop simulation, and shadow-mode fleet benchmarking.
• Oversee metric development and standardization for release gating of behavioral models.
• Partner with Planner, Prediction, MLOps, and Developer Efficiency teams on evaluation pipelines.
• Translate model performance trade-offs and risks into data-driven release decisions.

Skills

Team Leadership

ML Validation

Model Evaluation Frameworks

Statistical Analysis

Python

Education

Masters or PhD in CS, Robotics, Applied Statistics or related field

Tools

C++

Python

ML Platforms

Simulation Frameworks

Job description

Zoox is seeking a Manager of Model Validation & Verification for Behavior Autonomy to lead an engineering and data science team evaluating and benchmarking ML models and behavioral algorithms for autonomous vehicle stacks.

You will own validation pipelines, offline/online evaluation metrics, and data-driven release criteria in collaboration with Autonomy Software, Prediction, Planner, and ML Ops teams.