Head of Model Validation & Behavioral AI for Autonomy

Zoox; Sacramento (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

RSUs

Stock Appreciation Rights

Job summary

Zoox is seeking a Manager of Model Validation & Verification for Behavior Autonomy to lead an engineering and data science team responsible for evaluating, benchmarking, and validating ML models and behavioral algorithms that drive our autonomous vehicle prediction and planning stacks.

You will own the validation pipelines, metrics, and release criteria, partnering with Autonomy Software, Prediction, Planner, and MLOps to drive data-driven decisions for safe, reliable fleet behavior.

Qualifications

• Masters or PhD in CS, Robotics, Applied Statistics or a related field.
• 2+ years of direct engineering management experience leading Data Science/ML/V&V teams.
• 7+ years of technical experience in robotics, autonomous systems, or AI/ML.

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, simulations, and shadow-mode fleet benchmarking.
• Oversee metric development and standardization with Safety and Autonomy teams for release criteria.

Skills

Team leadership

Statistical validation

ML model evaluation

Release gating

Cross-functional collaboration

Data-driven decision making

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/Robotics/Applied Statistics

Tools

Python

C++

Job description

Zoox is seeking a Manager of Model Validation & Verification for Behavior Autonomy to lead an engineering and data science team responsible for evaluating, benchmarking, and validating ML models and behavioral algorithms that drive our autonomous vehicle prediction and planning stacks.

You will own the validation pipelines, metrics, and release criteria, partnering with Autonomy Software, Prediction, Planner, and MLOps to drive data-driven decisions for safe, reliable fleet behavior.