Software Engineer Intern, Perception Data

Zoox•Foster City, CA

About The Position

Zoox is transforming mobility with fully autonomous, electric vehicles designed from the ground up for a driverless future. Our mission is to make transportation safer, more sustainable, and accessible to everyone. At Zoox, innovation, collaboration, and a bold vision for the future drive everything we do. Zoox’s internship program offers hands-on experience with cutting-edge technology, mentorship from some of the industry’s brightest minds, and the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to real projects. We seek interns who demonstrate strong academic performance, engagement beyond the classroom, intellectual curiosity, and a genuine interest in Zoox’s mission. This internship opportunity is within the Perception Data team, which focuses on tooling and pipelines around autonomous vehicle perception data -- specifically the systems that discover, curate, and deliver high-quality training data at scale. Interns on this team will have the chance to work on Zoox's configurable data mining framework that powers large-scale extraction of labeled and unlabeled data from autonomous vehicle logs. This includes building new mining strategies (run loading, sample selection, and storage stages), integrating ML-driven data curation (e.g., embedding-based search, vision-language model filtering), scaling pipelines across distributed compute, and improving the developer experience around mining configuration and observability. Interns will gain valuable experience and insight into how targeted, high-quality training data is mined from petabyte-scale autonomous driving logs to improve the perception models that enable safe self-driving.

Requirements

Proficiency in Python, including experience with data-oriented libraries such as pandas, NumPy, or PyArrow
Experience with at least one web framework (e.g., FastAPI, Flask, Django) or frontend framework (e.g., Vue, React, Angular) with TypeScript
Understanding of fundamental computer vision concepts (e.g., object detection, image classification, 2D/3D bounding boxes, point clouds)
Experience with SQL or large-scale data processing tools (e.g., Databricks, PySpark, or similar)
Experience working with version control (Git) and code review workflows
Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work independently on open-ended engineering problems
Currently working towards a B.S, or M.S degree in a relevant engineering program
Good academic standing
Able to commit to a 12-week internship during one of the following summer 2026 cohorts: May 18th - August 7th, OR May 26th - August 14th, OR June 15th - September 4th
At least one previous industry internship, co-op, or project completed in a relevant area
Ability to relocate to the Bay Area, California for the duration of the internship

Nice To Haves

Experience with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, particularly for vision tasks
Familiarity with embedding models (e.g., CLIP/OpenCLIP) or vision-language models (VLMs) for data curation or retrieval
Experience with distributed computing or pipeline orchestration frameworks (e.g., Spark/PySpark, Airflow, or similar)
Exposure to cloud infrastructure (AWS S3, Databricks)
Familiarity with protobuf for structured data serialization
Prior work on data mining, active learning, or dataset curation for ML training
Experience with LiDAR/camera sensor data in autonomous driving or robotics contexts