Lead Data Platform Engineer - Enterprise, Data & AI

Socket.dev; Foster City (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Zoox is seeking a high-agency, hands-on Lead Data Platform Engineer to architect, optimize, scale and own the data foundation across enterprise and AI workloads. You will design a high-throughput data fabric, unify data across Zoox and downstream AI agents, and drive performance, governance and CI/CD pipelines to deliver secure, low-latency data foundations.

You will lead as the primary technical driver for the data platform, building scalable infrastructure, enforcing security standards like

Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in Data Platform Engineering or Software Engineering.
• Deep expertise in scaling, query tuning, compute-resource allocation, and implementing efficient lifecycle policies.
• Experience implementing enterprise security standards, RBAC, AD/IAM roles and data masking with compliance familiarity (SOX, audit trails).
• Experience establishing enterprise data governance frameworks, automated schema evolution controls, data quality audits and observability.
• Hands-on experience building automated CI/CD pipelines and deployment testing for data assets.

Responsibilities

• Scaling self-healing data pipelines that handle schema evolution, detect anomalies and recover from failures with minimal manual intervention.
• Define and enforce company-wide data governance, access controls, automated data quality testing, and metadata management.
• Implement storage lifecycle strategies and query optimization to minimize compute while delivering high-throughput, low-latency data access for analytics and AI agents.
• Build automated CI/CD deployment templates, environment isolation, testing frameworks and version control standards for data assets.

Skills

Data Platform Engineering

RBAC

CI/CD Pipelines

Databricks

AWS EMR

Data Governance

Observability/Alerting

Terraform

EKS

Security Compliance

Tools

Terraform

EKS

Databricks

Active Directory/IAM

Job description

Zoox is seeking a high-agency, hands-on Lead Data Platform Engineer to architect, optimize, scale and own the next generation of our enterprise & AI data foundation. In this role, you will architect a high throughput, data fabric that unifies data across Zoox and downstream AI agents. You will drive performance tuning, cost optimization, RBAC, data governance and CI/CD pipelines to deliver secure, low-latency, 'AI-ready' data foundations across the organization.

You will serve as the primary technical driver for our data platform, designing autonomous frameworks, building scalable data infrastructure and establishing strict standards for security and developer velocity. This is an engineering-intensive leadership role for a builder who thrives on solving complex challenges.

In This Role, You Will...

• Scaling self-healing data pipelines that automatically handle schema evolution, detect anomalies, execute circuit breakers and recover from failures without manual intervention.
• Define and enforce company-wide data governance, access, automated data quality testing, schema evolution policies and metadata management to maintain high-fidelity data assets.
• Implement intelligent storage lifecycle strategies, resource throttling and query optimization to minimize compute overhead while delivering high-throughput, low-latency data access for analytics and AI agents. With a focus on Databricks vs EMR (AWS) cloud optimization (cost and performance).
• Build automated CI/CD deployment templates, environment isolation, testing frameworks and version control standards, enabling rapid, reliable and zero-downtime deployments

Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in Data Platform Engineering or Software Engineering with a proven track record of architecting and scaling production-grade data foundations.
• Deep expertise in scaling and optimization, query tuning, compute resource allocation and implementing efficient compute-storage lifecycle policies to minimize infrastructure costs.
• Experience implementing enterprise security standards, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Active Directory/IAM roles and fine-grained data masking, with strong familiarity supporting enterprise compliance requirements (e.g., SOX, audit trail controls, data retention policies).
• Track record of establishing enterprise data governance frameworks, automated schema evolution controls, data quality audits and near real-time observability/alerting.
• Hands-on experience building automated CI/CD pipelines, environment isolation (branch testing, rollback mechanisms), version control and automated deployment testing for data assets.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience incorporating LLMs or GenAI directly into pipeline operations (e.g., code generation, triage and root-cause analysis, automated data reconciliation, backfills or anomaly detection).
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and containerization/orchestration (EKS) for elastic compute management. GPU/CPU performance optimization & utilization.
• Previous experience in the autonomous vehicle, robotics or high-tech manufacturing sectors.

About Zoox

Zoox is developing the first ground-up, fully autonomous vehicle fleet and the supporting ecosystem required to bring this technology to market. Sitting at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and design, Zoox aims to provide the next generation of mobility-as-a-service in urban environments. We’re looking for top talent that shares our passion and wants to be part of a fast-moving and highly execution-oriented team.

Accommodations

If you need an accommodation to participate in the application or interview process please reach out to [e-mail] or your assigned recruiter.

A Final Note:

You do not need to match every listed expectation to apply for this position. Here at Zoox, we know that diverse perspectives foster the innovation we need to be successful, and we are committed to building a team that encompasses a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and skills.