Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Scene Understanding
The Perception team at Zoox creates the "eyes and ears" of our self-driving robots. Navigating safely and efficiently in complex environments requires detecting, classifying, tracking, and understanding various attributes of surrounding objects—all in real-time and with exceptional accuracy.
As an engineer in the Scene Understanding team, you will develop advanced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that perceive our vehicle's surroundings to identify hazards and make driving suggestions. You will utilize VLA models for detecting rare events and ensuring safe driving in these situations. You'll work with state-of-the-art machine learning models that operate in real-time on our robotaxi platform with minimal latency. Collaborating with world-class engineers and researchers across sensors, planning, and other teams, you'll have access to premium sensor data and cutting-edge infrastructure to validate your algorithms in real-world conditions.
-
Design and train Vision-Language-Action (VLA) solutions for robotaxis
-
Lead end-to-end data strategy, including mining, auto-labeling, and dataset construction to power our ML flywheel
-
Lead the full post-training stack for VLMs and VLAs, including Continual Pre-training (CPT) on domain-specific driving data, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for instruction following.
-
Utilize our large-scale data pipelines and ML infrastructure to research, prototype, and deploy solutions that improve driving behavior
-
Partner with cross-functional teams to integrate perception signals
-
MS or PhD in Computer Science or related field
-
Background in deep learning solutions for VLM and VLA models
-
Track record in post-training large-scale models, CPT, SFT, RL
-
Hands-on experience with production ML pipelines, including dataset creation, training frameworks, and metrics
-
Expertise in Python libraries (PyTorch, NumPy, Pandas, VLLM)
-
Deep knowledge of cutting-edge computer vision techniques
-
Publications in top-tier conferences (CVPR, ICCV, RSS, ICRA)
-
Experience with integrating large language models to various tasks.
About Zoox
Zoox is developing the first ground-up, fully autonomous vehicle fleet and the supporting ecosystem required to bring this technology to market. Sitting at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and design, Zoox aims to provide the next generation of mobility-as-a-service in urban environments. We’re looking for top talent that shares our passion and wants to be part of a fast-moving and highly execution-oriented team.
Accommodations
If you need an accommodation to participate in the application or interview process please reach out to accommodations@zoox.com or your assigned recruiter.
A Final Note:
You do not need to match every listed expectation to apply for this position. Here at Zoox, we know that diverse perspectives foster the innovation we need to be successful, and we are committed to building a team that encompasses a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and skills.
Average salary estimate
If an employer mentions a salary or salary range on their job, we display it as an "Employer Estimate". If a job has no salary data, Rise displays an estimate if available.
Zoox is hiring a skilled C++ software engineer to design and maintain high-performance, safety-critical drivers for lidar, radar, and camera sensors that feed the autonomous driving stack.
Lead the measurement, experimentation, and data architecture for HingeSelect as the first dedicated Staff Product Data Scientist driving causal analysis, funnel optimization, and supply-demand modeling.
NBCUniversal is seeking an Advertising & Partnerships Data Science Academic Year intern to apply analytics, modeling, and AI/ML to real-world ad tech problems across its advertising product ecosystem.
Apply state-of-the-art AI to financial workflows at Rowspace by building retrieval systems, agentic pipelines, and evaluation frameworks that turn unstructured data into actionable investment insights.
Join Habitat Energy's Austin team as an MLOps Engineer to productionize and scale mission-critical forecasting and optimization models that power energy trading and analytics.
Pravah seeks an ML Summer Intern to work on cutting-edge forecasting, computer vision, and graph ML problems that support real-world electric grid deployments.
NBCUniversal seeks part-time Academic Year Data Science & Analytics interns to support decision sciences and sports content analytics at its Stamford, CT hub.
Lead the development of an AI Agent platform and production ML systems at Superhuman, driving orchestration, LLM integration, and proactive product experiences.
Thrad seeks a hands-on Data Scientist to drive product and commercial decisions through rigorous causal analysis, experimentation, and analytics at its San Francisco HQ.
Superhuman is hiring Data Scientists in San Francisco to lead experimentation, causal inference, and ML-driven analyses that influence product and growth decisions.
Lead Bugcrowd’s AI & Data Science team to design and operationalize scalable ML systems and generative AI solutions that power next-generation preemptive cybersecurity products.
Thrad seeks an Applied Scientist to design, train, and productionize real-time contextual ad relevance and bidding models for LLM conversations at its San Francisco HQ.
Zoox was founded to make personal transportation safer, cleaner, and more enjoyable—for everyone. To achieve that goal, the team created a whole new form of transportation. Zoox will provide mobility-as-a-service in dense urban environments.
31 jobs
🔮
Hi, I'm Risa! Your AI Career Copilot
you, just ask me below!
