Director, Perception Detection (AI)

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

Base salary: $410,000–$492,000 per year, excluding RSUs, stock appreciation rights, and potential sign-on bonus.

Company

Zoox develops fully autonomous vehicles and the supporting mobility ecosystem for dense urban environments.

What you will do

• Build and lead a group of perception managers and engineers, owning roadmap, productivity, execution, and impact.
• Set the technical vision and oversee complex perception projects from planning through delivery.
• Lead development of dynamic-object perception across vision, lidar, radar, and long-wave infrared.
• Drive capabilities across segmentation, detection, classification, sensor fusion, and tracking pipelines.
• Collaborate with AI, software, simulation, systems design, and mission assurance leaders.
• Present progress, recommendations, and technical direction to executive leadership.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in computer vision, machine learning, or related technologies.
• 8+ years of leadership experience managing teams of 40 or more.
• Strong understanding of computer vision systems, AI software stacks, and real-time systems.
• Experience implementing vision and perception algorithms, autonomy solutions, and real-world systems.
• Experience with end-to-end perception models, transformers, sparse networks, sensor fusion, and uncertainty modeling.
• Master’s degree or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field.

Nice to have

• Experience with autonomous vehicle or robotics perception.
• Experience deploying products or platforms into complex real-world environments.
• Experience validating risk-sensitive or safety-critical systems.
• Knowledge of GPU or TPU programming, including CUDA or TensorRT.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on autonomous mobility at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and vehicle design.
• Paid time off, including sick leave, vacation, and bereavement leave, plus unpaid time off.
• Health, long-term care, disability, and life insurance.
• Zoox Stock Appreciation Rights and Amazon Restricted Stock Units.