Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Zoox
ML Training Performance
$254-350k
Office located in Foster City, CA
Autonomous vehicle technology
Be an early applicant
Autonomous vehicle technology
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$254-350k
Office located in Foster City, CA
1001+ employees
Company mission
To reimagine transportation from the ground up.
Role
Who you are
- 7+ years of total experience, including 4+ years on large-scale model training platforms, with a record of leading projects end to end
- Deep experience with distributed training frameworks (Megatron-LM, TorchTitan) and efficiently utilizing GPU/accelerator clusters at scale
- Experience with RL frameworks (Verl/MILES) and algorithms (GRPO, PPO)
- Experience with collective communication libraries (e.g., NCCL) and optimizing communication/compute overlap in multi-node training
- Strong command of profiling tools (NVIDIA Nsight, PyTorch Profiler, or XLA/JAX profiling) to find and resolve training bottlenecks
- Proficiency in Python or C++
- Experience with ML compilers, performance tooling, or hardware/software co-design (GPU/TPU/accelerator architectures)
- Ability to influence across teams and communicate technical tradeoffs to both researchers and engineers
- You do not need to match every listed expectation to apply for this position
What the job involves
- Are you excited to own ML training optimization at Zoox and make the models that power autonomous driving train faster, cheaper, and at greater scale? You’ll set technical direction for distributed training, parallelism strategies, mixed-precision training, and RL on SOTA accelerators, especially for multi-modal VLA and VLM models
- You’ll partner with all Autonomy teams (Perception, Prediction, Planner, Simulation, Collision Avoidance) and act as a force multiplier for our internal customers, while mentoring engineers and shaping the team’s roadmap as we expand into new ML domains. If you want to learn more about our stack behind autonomous driving, please look here. If you want to learn more about our ML Infrastructure, here is one of our past talks at re:Invent
- Lead the design, implementation, and operation of training performance optimizations (data/tensor/pipeline parallelism, mixed precision, gradient checkpointing, GPU kernels) to scale VLM, VLA, and Foundation model training
- Own the technical strategy and multi-quarter roadmap for RL framework and RL performance optimization for driving foundation models
- Drive profiling and root-cause analysis of throughput bottlenecks across the compute, compiler, framework, and cluster-networking stack
- Partner with ML researchers, data engineers, and hardware engineers to define requirements and make architectural decisions for large-scale training infrastructure
- Build custom kernels and benchmarks that track and validate performance gains across the stack
- Mentor engineers and raise the team’s technical bar through design reviews and best practices
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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