Software Engineer - Planner Frameworks Pipeline

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. In this role, you will: 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 Qualifications Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field and 8+ years of industry experience Experience optimizing large-scale distributed systems for cost and efficiency Experience with AWS or similar providers Proficiency with Python and familiarity with C++ Bonus Qu

The Prediction & Behavior ML team is responsible for developing machine learning (ML) algorithms that learn and predict behaviors from data, applying them both on-vehicle to influence driving behavior and off-vehicle to provide ML capabilities to simulation and validation. Given the tight integration of behavior forecasting and motion planning, our team collaborates closely with the Planner team to advance overall vehicle behavior. We also work closely with our Perception, Simulation, and Systems Engineering teams to accelerate our ability to validate our driving performance. As a Learned Trajectory Machine Learning Engineer you will be responsible for developing deep learned models that produce trajectories for our vehicles to drive. Given the tight integration of behavior prediction and motion planning, you will closely collaborate with the Planner and Perception teams in the advancement of our overall vehicle behavior. In this role, you will: You will develop new deep learning models that use imitation learning and reinforcement learning to generate driving plans for our autonomous vehicle. You will also work on techniques to estimate the quality of those driving plans along the dimensions of safety, progress, comfort etc. You will leverage our large-scale machine learning infrastructure to discover new solutions and push the boundaries of the field You will develop metrics and tools to analyze errors and understand improvements of our systems You will collaborate with engineers on Perception, Planning, and Simulation to solve the overall Autonomous Driving problem in complex urban environments Qualifications BS, MS, or PhD degree in computer science or related field Experience with training and deploying transformer-based model architectures and reinforcement learning Experience with production Machine Learning pipelines: dataset creation, training frameworks, metrics pipelines Fluency in C++

The Prediction & Behavior ML team is responsible for developing machine learning (ML) algorithms that learn and predict behaviors from data, applying them both on-vehicle to influence driving behavior and off-vehicle to provide ML capabilities to simulation and validation. Given the tight integration of behavior forecasting and motion planning, our team collaborates closely with the Planner team to advance overall vehicle behavior. We also work closely with our Perception, Simulation, and Systems Engineering teams to accelerate our ability to validate our driving performance. As a Learned Trajectory Machine Learning Engineer you will be responsible for developing deep learned models that produce trajectories for our vehicles to drive. Given the tight integration of behavior prediction and motion planning, you will closely collaborate with the Planner and Perception teams in the advancement of our overall vehicle behavior. In this role, you will: You will develop new deep learning models that use imitation learning and reinforcement learning to generate driving plans for our autonomous vehicle. You will also work on techniques to estimate the quality of those driving plans along the dimensions of safety, progress, comfort etc. You will leverage our large-scale machine learning infrastructure to discover new solutions and push the boundaries of the field You will develop metrics and tools to analyze errors and understand improvements of our systems You will collaborate with engineers on Perception, Planning, and Simulation to solve the overall Autonomous Driving problem in complex urban environments Qualifications BS, MS, or PhD degree in computer science or related field Experience with training and deploying transformer-based model architectures and reinforcement learning Experience with production Machine Learning pipelines: dataset creation, training frameworks, metrics pipelines Fluency in Pyt

As the Manager of Model Validation & Verification (VnV) for Behavior Autonomy, you will lead an engineering and data science team responsible for evaluating, benchmarking, and validating the machine learning models and behavioral algorithms that drive our autonomous vehicle (AV) prediction and planning stacks. You will own the statistical frameworks, offline/online evaluation metrics, and validation pipelines that ensure our behavioral models operate safely, comfortably, and predictably. Operating at the intersection of Data Science, Machine Learning, and Safety Engineering, you will partner closely with Autonomy Software, Prediction, Planner, and ML Operations teams to establish data driven release criteria for our AV fleet. In this role, you will: Team Leadership & Execution: Lead, mentor, and scale a high-performing team of Data Scientists, ML Validation Engineers, and Software Engineers while driving roadmaps, sprint execution, resource allocation, and high-throughput model releases with rigorous safety guardrails. Culture of Rigor: Foster a culture of statistical excellence, healthy skepticism, proactive risk tracking, and data-driven decision-making. Validation Strategy & Methodologies: Define and execute end-to-end validation strategies across offline evaluation, open/closed-loop simulation, and shadow-mode fleet benchmarking to ensure robust behavioral model performance. Statistical uncertainties, and regressions into clear, data-driven recommendations for release gating and executive leadership. Metrics, Release Gating & Rigor: Oversee metric development and standardization with System Safety and Autonomy teams, establishing quantitative go/no-go release criteria for Behavioral Planner and Prediction ML models while fostering statistical rigor and proactive risk management. Cross-Functional & Infrastructure Partnership: Partner closely with Planner, Prediction, MLOps

Zoox is on a mission to reimagine transportation and ground-up build autonomous robotaxis that are safe, reliable, clean, and enjoyable for everyone. We are still in the early stages of deploying our robotaxis on public roads, and it is a great time to join Zoox and have a significant impact in executing this mission. The ML Platform team at Zoox plays a crucial role in enabling innovations in ML and CV to make autonomous driving as seamless as possible. The Opportunity Would you like to be part of the ML Training platform team that enables autonomous driving, driving scenario understanding, learned planning and trajectories, large scale driving simulations and several other ML use cases at Zoox? You will get to work across all ML teams within Zoox - Foundation Models, Perception, Prediction, Planner, Simulation, Data Science, Collision Avoidance, etc. and have the opportunity to significantly push the boundaries of how ML is practiced within Zoox. The ML Training platform team builds and operates the core part of the ML platform that powers model training at scale. We are responsible for developing and operating ML tools, deep learning frameworks, and distributed model training infrastructure to support foundational models and reinforcement learning. This team also owns the model repository and model lifecycle management tools used by our applied research teams for in- and off-vehicle ML use cases. You will play a crucial role in reducing the time it takes from ideation to productionization of cutting-edge AI innovation. This team has a lot of growth opportunities as we expand our robotaxi deployments and venture into new ML domains. In this role, you will: Build the Zoox Training framework leveraged by all ML teams within Zoox. This framework needs to be highly scalable, reliable, and efficient. Design, implement, and operate a robust and efficient ML platform to enable the training, validation, serving, and monitoring of ML models. Co

The Perception team at Zoox is responsible for the robot’s understanding of the world, fusing data from Lidar, Radar, and Cameras to create a unified representation of the environment. In this role, you will contribute to the development of our next-generation 3D occupancy and segmentation networks. You will architect and optimize high-performance deep learning models that generate dense, temporally consistent voxel representations of the driving environment. This work is critical for enabling our vehicle to navigate complex urban scenarios, handle rare obstacles, and drive safely in tight spaces by providing precise geometry and motion estimates to downstream planners. In this role, you will... Design and implement state-of-the-art multi-modal sensor fusion architectures (Lidar, Camera, Radar) to predict 3D occupancy, semantic segmentation, and flow . Develop "vision-first" fusion strategies to enhance geometric understanding and reduce dependency on sparse sensor modalities . Engineer temporal processing modules to improve the stability and consistency of predictions over time. Optimize model architectures for real-time on-vehicle inference, balancing high-fidelity range extension with strict latency constraints . Collaborate with downstream consumers (Tracking, Prediction, Planner) to refine geometric outputs, such as contours and free-space estimations, for complex maneuvering. Qualifications MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or related field with 6+ years of industry experience. Deep expertise in 3D Computer Vision and Deep Learning, specifically with voxel-based or BEV (Bird's Eye View) architectures. Strong proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch) for model training and design as well as some experience in C++ for model integration. Experienc