Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Perception Attributes

Zoox•Foster City, CA

About The Position

As a machine learning engineer within the Attributes team in the Perception department, you will take ownership of developing and enhancing sophisticated behavioral models for various road users, including vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists. Your work will focus on creating and maintaining robust perception attribute models that generate critical signals for our autonomous driving stack. These signals are essential inputs that enable our Prediction and Planning teams to make intelligent, safe driving decisions for our autonomous vehicles. The Attributes team is fundamental to Zoox's autonomous driving capabilities. The models you develop will serve as the foundation for how our vehicles understand and interact with other road users, directly contributing to the safety and effectiveness of our autonomous driving system. By creating reliable and accurate behavioral models, you enable Zoox's vehicles to make smart, safe decisions in complex urban environments, bringing us closer to our goal of revolutionizing urban mobility.

Requirements

MS/PhD in computer science or related fields with a minimum of 7 years of relevant experience
Experience with training and deploying Deep Learning models
Experience with knowledge distillations from large foundation models
Experience with production Machine Learning pipelines: dataset creation, training frameworks, metrics pipelines
Fluency programming in Python and extensive experience with algorithm design
Strong mathematics skills

Nice To Haves

Familiarity of VLMs/VLAs/ViTs
Experience with large model distillation in a production environment
Familiarity with C++

Responsibilities

Lead the development of sophisticated behavioral models for vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists as a key member of the Attributes team within Zoox's Perception department.
Create and maintain perception attribute models that generate essential signals, enabling our autonomous vehicles to understand and predict the behavior of various road users.
Collaborate closely with Prediction and Planning teams to optimize your models' outputs, directly influencing how our autonomous vehicles make real-time driving decisions.
Work with data labeling and ontology teams on data labeling and ontology definitions of the road users in different attributes and generate auto-labeling or data mining strategies for different attributes.
Help shape the future of autonomous mobility by bridging the critical gap between raw perception data and autonomous decision-making.