Lead Data Platform Engineer - Enterprise, Data & AI

Location: Foster City, CA; hybrid workplace

Company

Zoox develops autonomous vehicle technology and supporting AI and software platforms.

What you will do

• Architect, optimize, scale, and own a high-throughput data fabric unifying enterprise data and supporting downstream AI agents.
• Scale self-healing data pipelines with schema evolution handling, anomaly detection, circuit breakers, and automated failure recovery.
• Define and enforce data governance, access controls, automated data quality testing, schema evolution policies, and metadata management.
• Implement storage lifecycle strategies, resource throttling, and query optimization for high-throughput, low-latency analytics and AI data access, including Databricks versus AWS EMR optimization.
• Build CI/CD deployment templates, environment isolation, testing frameworks, version-control standards, and zero-downtime deployment processes.

Requirements

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in Data Platform Engineering or Software Engineering, with a record of architecting and scaling production-grade data foundations.
• Deep expertise in scaling and optimization, query tuning, compute resource allocation, and compute-storage lifecycle policies for infrastructure cost reduction.
• Experience implementing enterprise security standards, RBAC, Active Directory/IAM roles, fine-grained data masking, and enterprise compliance controls such as SOX, audit trails, and data retention policies.
• Experience establishing enterprise data governance frameworks, automated schema evolution controls, data quality audits, and near-real-time observability and alerting.
• Hands-on experience building automated CI/CD pipelines, environment isolation including branch testing and rollback mechanisms, version control, and automated deployment testing for data assets.

Nice to have

• Experience incorporating LLMs or GenAI into pipeline operations for code generation, triage, root-cause analysis, data reconciliation, backfills, or anomaly detection.
• Experience with Terraform, EKS, containerization and orchestration for elastic compute management, plus GPU/CPU performance optimization and utilization.
• Previous experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or high-tech manufacturing.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employment in a hybrid workplace.
• Engineering-intensive leadership role focused on building secure, scalable, and reliable data infrastructure.
• Work involving enterprise data, analytics, AI agents, governance, security, and developer velocity.