$230K – $277K/yr
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 impl
