Manager - Model Evaluation (AI)

Location: Foster City, California, United States; hybrid workplace

Base salary: $237,000–$338,000 per year, plus potential RSUs, stock appreciation rights, and sign-on bonus.

Company

Zoox is developing a fully autonomous vehicle fleet and the mobility-as-a-service ecosystem supporting it, combining robotics, machine learning, and vehicle design.

What you will do

• Lead and scale a team of Data Scientists, ML Validation Engineers, and Software Engineers.
• Define validation strategies across offline evaluation, open- and closed-loop simulation, and shadow-mode fleet benchmarking.
• Develop and standardize metrics and quantitative release criteria for behavioral prediction and planning models.
• Partner with Autonomy Software, Planner, Prediction, MLOps, Developer Efficiency, and System Safety teams.
• Improve dataset and evaluation pipelines while managing runtime and compute costs.
• Communicate model trade-offs, statistical uncertainty, regressions, and safety risks to executive leadership.

Requirements

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Applied Statistics, or a related field.
• 3+ years of engineering management experience leading Data Science, Machine Learning, or V&V teams.
• 7+ years of technical experience in robotics, autonomous systems, or AI/ML.
• Strong experience with ML model validation, behavioral evaluation frameworks, system benchmarking, and statistics.
• Strong foundation in Python and modern data/ML platforms, with familiarity with C++ or distributed systems.
• Experience leading teams that evaluate complex robotic systems and working across release velocity, compute cost, and safety requirements.

Nice to have

• Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, or other safety-critical systems.
• Experience building large-scale simulation, model evaluation, or validation infrastructure.
• Experience with reinforcement learning, generative AI, or distributed ML systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Fast-moving, execution-oriented environment focused on autonomous mobility.
• Paid time off, including sick leave, vacation, and bereavement leave.
• Health, life, disability, and long-term care insurance.
• Zoox Stock Appreciation Rights and Amazon Restricted Stock Units.
• Unpaid time off and possible sign-on bonus.