Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Planner Frameworks Pipeline

Zoox; Foster City (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid parental leave

Work from home opportunities

Health insurance

Comprehensive mental health support

Generous family planning support

Daily changing menu of local dishes

Busy calendar of social events

Job summary

Zoox is seeking an experienced Software Engineer to develop large-scale simulation pipelines for their self-driving vehicle. This role entails optimizing distributed systems for reliability and efficiency while contributing to the architecture and providing production-grade APIs and tools.

The ideal candidate will have 8+ years of experience and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. Familiarity with Python, C++, and AWS is highly preferred, along with experience in optimizing machine learning workloads.

Zoox values work-life balance, offering extensive health benefits and flexible work-from-home options.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of industry experience.
• Experience optimizing costs and efficiencies in large-scale distributed systems.
• Background in algorithmic optimization or performance investigation.

Responsibilities

• Work on large-scale simulation pipelines for the Zoox self-driving vehicle.
• Contribute to the framework’s architecture, reliability, and efficiency.
• Create production-grade APIs, SDKs, and tools for validating autonomous behaviors.

Skills

Python proficiency

C++ familiarity

Distributed systems optimization

Machine learning workloads exposure

AWS experience

Ray.io experience

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

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
• 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

Benefits

• Paid parental leave
• Affinity groups and sports clubs
• Work from home opportunities
• Health insurance
• Our crew’s health and happiness is our first priority. We offer comprehensive health and mental health support, a wellbeing program, and unlimited and flexible paid time away
• We invest in our crew—and their families—for the long term. That includes generous family planning support, caregiver support, and strong cash compensation with great equity upside
• We look after our crew when they’re in the office too. Our famous food program is a great example, featuring a daily changing menu of local and sustainable dishes
• There’s a busy calendar of social events at Zoox, with more sports teams than you can count. And, of course, playing with robots is an important part of the job description

Qualifications

• Proficiency with Python and familiarity with C++
• Experience optimizing large-scale distributed systems for cost and efficiency
• Experience with AWS or similar providers
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field and 8+ years of industry experience
• 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