Machine Learning Engineer – Highway Perception & Real‑Time AI

Zoox; Foster City (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Zoox Stock Appreciation Rights

Amazon RSUs

Paid time off

Job summary

Zoox is seeking experienced engineers to advance Scene Understanding and Semantic Reasoning for autonomous vehicles. You will develop production-grade multi-task transformers and integrate VLA model outputs to build comprehensive spatial representations for our fleet.

You will collaborate with perception, mapping, and motion planning teams, optimize for real-time use on vehicle hardware, and tackle edge cases in high-speed driving to improve safety and performance.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or related field with professional software engineering experience in autonomous driving, robotics, or computer vision.
• Deep understanding of 2D/3D computer vision, semantic segmentation, and deep learning architectures.
• Proficiency in modern C++ and Python; experience with JAX or PyTorch.
• Experience deploying real-time ML models on resource-constrained embedded systems or on-vehicle hardware.
• Familiarity with highway autonomous driving mapping/perception challenges and VLMs.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and deploy deep learning models for semantic reasoning in high-speed highway environments.
• Collaborate with Scene Intelligence, Semantic Grounding, and PCP Mapping teams to enhance the ML stack for highway scenarios.
• Define semantic representation requirements with downstream motion planning teams and validate outputs against safety metrics.
• Optimize models for real-time inference within Zoox vehicle compute constraints.
• Investigate and resolve perception regressions in high-speed simulations and live fleet data.
• Contribute to long-term North Star architecture for Perception Semantic Reasoning and scalable fleet deployment.

Skills

C++

Python

Computer vision

Semantic segmentation

Deep learning

JAX

PyTorch

Embedded systems

Real-time deployment

Publications in AI conferences

Education

MS (CS/Robotics)

PhD (CS/Robotics)

Job description

Zoox is seeking experienced engineers to advance Scene Understanding and Semantic Reasoning for autonomous vehicles. You will develop production-grade multi-task transformers and integrate VLA model outputs to build comprehensive spatial representations for our fleet.

You will collaborate with perception, mapping, and motion planning teams, optimize for real-time use on vehicle hardware, and tackle edge cases in high-speed driving to improve safety and performance.