Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Core Connectivity (C++)

Location: Hybrid in Foster City, CA, or Seattle, WA, United States

Salary: USD 255,000–320,000 per year

Company

Zoox develops fully autonomous vehicles and the supporting mobility-as-a-service ecosystem, combining robotics, machine learning, and automotive software.

What you will do

• Design and build low-latency inter-process and inter-host transport in C++, including zero-copy data paths, shared-memory buffers, and lock-free queues.
• Measure and reduce end-to-end latency and jitter as message volume increases.
• Design transport that remains reliable through process crashes and restarts, out-of-order host startup, and delayed or dropped network packets; investigate fleet and simulation issues to root cause.
• Build pub/sub and RPC messaging APIs with required delivery, ordering, and latency guarantees.
• Evolve Protocol Buffers-based schemas and serialization, including compact encodings and migration of existing users.
• Set technical direction and lead designs spanning multiple teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, electrical engineering, computer engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of software development experience.
• Strong modern C++ experience on Linux in large codebases with performance-critical paths.
• Background in transport or networking software, such as messaging systems, network protocols, or communication between distributed systems.
• Experience building low-latency systems and measuring and reducing tail latency using techniques such as zero-copy, shared memory, lock-free data structures, and cache-aware data layout.
• Solid systems fundamentals, including concurrency, memory management, process lifecycle, sockets, and the Linux networking stack.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with shared-memory IPC, pub/sub or RPC middleware such as DDS, ROS 2, or iceoryx, or serialization frameworks such as Protocol Buffers, nanopb, or FlatBuffers.
• Experience with PTP (IEEE 1588) or other time synchronization across machines, UDP multicast, MTU and fragmentation behavior, or time-sensitive networking.
• Experience in robotics, automotive, aerospace, or another real-time or safety-relevant domain.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time role within a fast-moving, highly execution-oriented autonomous vehicle organization.
• Work directly with software teams whose applications depend on the core connectivity layer.
• Zoox values diverse perspectives and backgrounds in building its engineering organization.