Staff / Senior Staff Software Engineer - Collision Avoidance System
About The Position
The Collision Avoidance System (CAS) is Zoox’s independent safety layer. It runs alongside the main autonomy stack, monitors for imminent collisions, and reacts within milliseconds to prevent or reduce them. By using methods and data paths distinct from the main stack, CAS provides a second, diverse line of defense in dense urban environments. As a Staff or Senior Staff engineer, you will serve as the technical lead for CAS algorithms, focusing on perception. You will shape how CAS perceives the world by combining interpretable geometric methods with machine learning, and own the architecture and roadmap for taking these capabilities from initial design through safe, real-time deployment on Zoox’s fleet. The work directly affects the safety of riders and road users.
Requirements
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- At least 10 years of experience developing perception or related algorithms for robotics, autonomous vehicles, or other real-time systems.
- Deep expertise in 3D perception from lidar, radar, and/or camera.
- Hands-on experience with both machine-learning methods, including detection, segmentation, and fusion, and classical methods, including geometry, state estimation, and tracking.
- Strong C++ or Python skills.
- Track record of shipping efficient, reliable real-time software to production.
- Experience leading the architecture and technical roadmap of a complex production system across multiple teams.
Nice To Haves
- Conference or journal publications in machine-learning or robotics-related venues.
- Experience with safety-critical systems or functional safety practices, such as ISO 26262 or SOTIF.
- Experience with collision avoidance, emergency braking, prediction, or planning systems for autonomous vehicles.
- Experience optimizing and deploying models or algorithms on onboard compute, such as GPU/CUDA or TensorRT.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the technical lead and architect for CAS perception, defining how lidar, radar, and camera data are used for obstacle detection, tracking, and collision-risk estimates within tight latency and compute budgets.
- Design, implement, and ship machine-learning and classical perception algorithms in production-quality, safety-critical C++, including point-cloud geometry, ground estimation, clustering, state estimation and tracking, learned detection and segmentation, and sensor fusion.
- Own the end-to-end CAS algorithm architecture and multi-release technical roadmap, balancing safety, performance, latency, compute, and machine-learning versus non-machine-learning approaches.
- Partner with CAS perception, behavior and planning, and validation teams to define interfaces, requirements, metrics, and evaluation strategies that demonstrate safety and launch readiness.
- Work with sensor, system performance, safety strategy, and main autonomy teams to drive cross-team technical decisions.
- Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across CAS.
Benefits
- Paid time off, including sick leave, vacation, and bereavement.
- 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
