Staff Software Engineer, Zoox
HPC
$230-295k
+ Amazon Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), and Zoox Stock Appreciation Rights
Autonomous vehicle technology
Be an early applicant
Autonomous vehicle technology
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$230-295k
+ Amazon Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), and Zoox Stock Appreciation Rights
1001+ employees
Company mission
To reimagine transportation from the ground up.
Role
Who you are
- Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems in production
- Experience with Ray.io, particularly Ray Core and Ray Data (or equivalent technologies)
- Experience with Kubernetes, particularly for heterogeneous workloads
- Experience with cloud infrastructure on AWS or similar providers
- Track record of shipping and operating reliable, scalable infrastructure
- Demonstrated ability to prioritize development work and build cross-functional consensus around technical tradeoffs
- Proficiency with Python
Desirable
- Exposure to machine learning workloads (training, inference, data generation)
- Experience with Kubernetes or SLURM at scale (>10k+ nodes)
- Experience with SLURM workload manager and advanced scheduling policies
- Background in algorithmic optimization or operations research
- Experience building developer tools and platforms used by large engineering organizations
What the job involves
- Zoox is looking for an experienced Staff Software Engineer to build, scale, and operate our custom High-Performance Computing infrastructure. As Zoox scales its autonomous vehicle development, our HPC platform must keep pace with rapidly growing compute, storage, and scheduling demands across the company
- You will modernize our HPC platform—built on industry-leading technologies like Ray.io, SLURM, and Kubernetes—with a focus on reliability, scalability, and world-class developer velocity
- These HPC services form the backbone of development workflows across all Zoox software teams, from data engineering to training our AI models in Perception, Planner, Prediction, to Simulation, and more. You will have a direct impact on the productivity and effectiveness of every engineering team at Zoox
- The position comes with a high degree of independence and the opportunity to define Zoox's HPC platform strategy, both technically and organizationally. You will work closely with stakeholders in Autonomy and Software teams to understand their workload requirements and translate them into robust, scalable infrastructure
- Design and implement core services and abstractions for distributed compute infrastructure supporting thousands of concurrent jobs
- Work with customer teams and other infrastructure teams to build a multiyear software engineering roadmap for the HPC platform
- Lead multi-quarter, cross team initiatives that drive org-wide improvements
- Create production-grade APIs, SDKs, and tools that make it easy for engineers across Zoox to run large-scale distributed workloads
- Design and improve job scheduling algorithms and auto-scaling policies to maximize reliability and resource availability
- Design multi-region orchestration strategies that optimize for data locality, reliability, and performance
- Identify and resolve systemic reliability and performance issues through profiling, analysis, and collaboration with workload owners across multiple teams
- Evaluate new technologies and paradigms that improve Zoox's computational and storage capabilities
- Develop capacity planning tools and forecasting models to support Zoox's growing compute needs
- Mentor junior engineers, guiding them through their career development
Our take
Zoox, a self-driving vehicle company, was founded to make personal transportation safer and more enjoyable for all. It has aimed to achieve this goal by creating a new mode of driverless transportation, thus eradicating the safety and logistical issues that come with human drivers.
It revealed its custom vehicle design in December 2020, showcasing something different from just a car without a driver. Uniquely, all four wheels are independent of one another, and the vehicles have no front or back, making them more agile than a standard car. Zoox claims that it is different from other industry players because it has created an entire driverless ecosystem, including the vehicle itself, allowing it to have more control.
The company is fast becoming a major player in an industry that is predicted to be worth $2 trillion by 2030. Electric motors are highly desirable, particularly in an urban environment, as governments look for ways to reduce emissions and improve air quality. Zoox is aiming to play a vital role in this evolution towards more sustainable urban mobility. Amazon acquired the company in 2020 and, despite a general downturn in the sector through 2022, opened its first Zoox factory for robotaxis in 2025 and is testing the autonomous vehicles in multiple cities in the US.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
24% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Oct 2019
$200m
CONVERTIBLE
Jul 2018
$500m
SERIES B
Total funding: $1.2bn
Company 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
Company HQ
Vintage Park, Foster City, CA
Leadership
Aicha Evans
(CEO)Having studied at the George Washington University, Aicha started her career with 2 years in Engineering at Skyworks before joining Intel, where she spent over 11 years. She left her role as Corporate Strategy Officer in February 2019 to join Zoox as CEO.
Jesse Levinson
(CTO)Prior to co-founding Zoox, completed a Computer Science PhD at Stanford University. Also created Pro HDR, a million+ selling mobile photography app.
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