Senior Data Scientist - Verification & Validation (AI)

Location: Hybrid in Foster City, California or Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Company

Zoox is developing a full-stack autonomous vehicle system for cities.

What you will do

• Design statistical evaluation frameworks for safety-critical AI systems.
• Analyze log data, simulation results, and structured closed-course testing to produce validation evidence.
• Identify edge-case failures and provide data-driven recommendations to engineering teams and executive leadership.
• Define performance metrics and data extraction strategies across engineering teams.
• Lead evaluation through prototyping, requirements capture, design, implementation, and validation.
• Build and maintain scalable data processing and simulation pipelines for petabytes of driving data.

Requirements

• MS or PhD in Statistics, Computer Science, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, or a related quantitative field.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL, including production-quality code.
• Expertise in hypothesis testing, power analysis, spatiotemporal modeling, Bayesian inference, and multivariate analysis.
• Experience with large-scale data analysis and statistical modeling.
• Proficiency with Git, unit testing, and collaborative development practices.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with production machine learning pipelines, dataset creation, training frameworks, and metrics pipelines.
• Experience with Apache Spark, Spark SQL, or Databricks.
• Experience designing metrics and delivering actionable insights for business decisions.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employment in a hybrid workplace.
• Cross-functional collaboration with AI software, System Design and Mission Assurance, Simulation, Sensors, and other teams.
• Hands-on work combining statistical rigor with software engineering and distributed computing.