Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Core Connectivity
About The Position
Zoox is hiring a Senior/Staff Software Engineer for its Core Connectivity team, which builds the systems that move data among processes and compute hosts inside autonomous vehicles. This layer includes shared-memory inter-process communication, inter-host transport, serialization, application-facing RPC and messaging patterns, and time synchronization. The work supports nearly every software team at Zoox and has a direct impact on vehicle behavior. The engineer will develop fast, predictable, low-latency transport and messaging systems that remain reliable when processes or hosts restart, initialize out of order, or experience network delays or packet loss. The role also includes diagnosing fleet and simulation issues, evolving schemas and serialization formats, and setting technical direction across teams.
Requirements
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in computer science, electrical or computer engineering, or equivalent experience.
- 7+ years of experience in software development.
- Strong modern C++ skills on Linux, including work in large codebases with performance-critical paths.
- Background in transport or networking software, such as messaging systems, network protocols, or communication between distributed systems.
- Experience building low-latency systems and measuring and reducing tail latency.
- Experience with techniques such as zero-copy, shared memory, lock-free data structures, and cache-aware data layout.
- Solid systems fundamentals, including concurrency, memory management, process lifecycle, sockets, and the Linux networking stack.
Nice To Haves
- Hands-on experience with shared-memory IPC, pub/sub or RPC middleware such as DDS, ROS 2, or iceoryx, or serialization frameworks such as Protocol Buffers, nanopb, or FlatBuffers.
- Experience with PTP (IEEE 1588) or other time synchronization across machines, UDP multicast, MTU and fragmentation behavior, or time-sensitive networking.
- Experience in robotics, automotive, aerospace, or another real-time or safety-relevant domain.
Responsibilities
- Design and build low-latency inter-process and inter-host transport in C++, including zero-copy data paths, shared-memory buffers, and lock-free queues.
- Measure and reduce end-to-end latency and jitter as message volume grows.
- Design transport that handles process crashes and restarts, hosts starting out of order, and networks that drop or delay packets.
- Investigate fleet and simulation issues, identify root causes, and fix problems in the system design.
- Build pub/sub and RPC messaging APIs that provide application teams with the delivery, ordering, and latency guarantees they need.
- Evolve message schemas and the Protocol Buffers-based serialization layer, including schema evolution, compact encodings, and migrations that do not break existing users.
- Set technical direction for part of the stack and lead designs spanning several teams.
Benefits
- Paid time off, including sick leave, vacation, and bereavement leave.
- Unpaid time off.
- Zoox Stock Appreciation Rights.
- Amazon Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
- Health insurance.
- Long-term care insurance.
- Long-term and short-term disability insurance.
- Life insurance.
- A sign-on bonus may be offered as part of the compensation package.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
