Student Worker - Machine Learning Engineer - Data Mining & VLM

Zoox • Foster City, CA

4d • Onsite

About The Position

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

• Extend triagers from simulation to fleet/service data
• 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.
• Experience with prompt optimization, model fine-tuning, or human-in-the-loop ML systems.

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

Benefits

• Compensation for this role is $30/hour.
• benefits eligibility is determined by the vendor.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Part-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: Associate degree