Staff / Senior Staff Software Engineer - Collision Avoidance System

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

Salary: $291,000–$409,000 per year

Company

Zoox develops robotaxi autonomy systems, including an independent Collision Avoidance System that provides a diverse safety layer alongside the main autonomy stack.

What you will do

• Serve as technical lead and architect for CAS perception, converting lidar, radar, and camera data into obstacle detection, tracking, and collision-risk estimates under strict latency and compute constraints.
• Design, implement, and ship machine-learning and classical perception algorithms in production-quality, safety-critical C++.
• Own the end-to-end CAS algorithm architecture and multi-release technical roadmap, balancing safety, performance, latency, compute, and ML versus non-ML approaches.
• Partner with perception, behavior and planning, validation, sensor, system performance, safety strategy, and autonomy teams to define interfaces, requirements, metrics, and evaluation strategies.
• Mentor engineers and drive cross-team technical decisions and technical quality across CAS.

Requirements

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• At least 10 years of experience developing perception or related algorithms for robotics, autonomous vehicles, or other real-time systems.
• Deep expertise in 3D perception using lidar, radar, and/or cameras, with hands-on experience in machine learning for detection, segmentation, and fusion.
• Hands-on experience with classical perception methods including geometry, state estimation, and tracking.
• Strong C++ or Python skills and a track record of shipping efficient, reliable real-time software to production.
• Experience leading the architecture and technical roadmap of a complex production system across multiple teams.

Nice to have

• Conference or journal publications in machine learning or robotics venues.
• Experience with safety-critical systems or functional safety practices such as ISO 26262 or SOTIF.
• Experience with collision avoidance, emergency braking, prediction, or planning systems for autonomous vehicles.
• Experience optimizing and deploying models or algorithms on onboard compute, including GPU, CUDA, or TensorRT.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work arrangement in Foster City, California.
• Work on a safety-critical system whose performance directly affects riders and road users.
• Cross-functional collaboration across autonomy, safety, sensor, validation, behavior, and planning teams.