Student Worker - Machine Learning Engineer - Data Mining & VLM
About The Position
Zoox's part-time student worker program puts you at the center of one of the most ambitious challenges in transportation. You'll contribute to real projects, work alongside engineers and researchers pushing the boundaries of autonomous technology, and gain experience that goes well beyond the classroom. We're looking for students who bring strong academic foundations, curiosity that doesn't stop at coursework, and a drive to be part of something that matters. Role Overview Support Zoox's Rules of the Road (RotR) program, where a miner + LLM/VLM tooling method automatically mines and triages potential road-rule violation events from simulation and fleet data. The student will be helping create or improve the data miners that generate the candidate events, help develop and evaluate the VLM triagers — curating golden datasets, measuring precision/recall against expert triage, and extending automation to new regulations and data sources.
Requirements
- Strong Python / Pyspark / SQL skills
- Coursework in machine learning, computer vision, or NLP.
- Understanding of supervised learning, model evaluation, and common sources of dataset bias and label noise.
- Analyze error cases and translate findings into pipeline improvements
- Hands-on experience building production LLM/VLM applications, including agentic workflows, RAG, tool calling, evaluation, and/or fine-tuning.
- Familiarity with software-engineering practices such as Git, unit testing, debugging, and code reviews.
Nice To Haves
- Strong Scala skills.
- Experience with Spark optimization and distributed data-processing systems.
- Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, mapping, or transportation-related datasets.
- Experience evaluating multimodal or vision-language models.
- Currently enrolled in a B.S. or M.S. program in a relevant discipline.
- Experience with prompt optimization, model fine-tuning, or human-in-the-loop ML systems.
- Available to commit to a minimum three-month assignment.
- Able to commit a minimum of 40 hours per week.
- Able to work on-site at one of our office locations.
- Must adhere with Zoox confidentiality requirements, including refraining from using or sharing proprietary company information outside of Zoox, such as in academic research, theses, publications, or presentations.
Responsibilities
- Develop and iterate data miners locating potential RotR Violations following SSO requirements
- Develop and iterate on VLM/LLM workflows and pipelines for classifying RotR events
- Curate golden datasets and evaluate triager precision/recall against human triage
- Extend triagers from simulation to fleet/service data
Benefits
- Compensation for this role is $30/hour.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Part-time
Career Level
Entry Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
