Contract Student Worker (Autonomy Safety Data Engineer)

• This role focuses on building a data-driven safety risk model that quantifies and improves autonomous-vehicle driving performance, along with the data analysis work that supports it
• The student will work within the Safety Strategy & Operations team on a 6-month project spanning model development, empirical experimentation, and large-scale driving/simulation data analysis
• Support designing, building, and iterating on a data-driven safety risk model that quantifies driving performance and surfaces safety-relevant signals across the autonomy stack
• Assist developing and maintaining dataset management pipelines — curation, labeling, versioning, and quality checks — that feed the risk model and downstream analyses
• Support defining and running empirical experiments that “show it with data” rather than relying on assumptions

Benefits

• Paid parental leave
• Affinity groups and sports clubs
• Work from home opportunities
• Health insurance
• Our crew’s health and happiness is our first priority. We offer comprehensive health and mental health support, a wellbeing program, and unlimited and flexible paid time away
• We invest in our crew—and their families—for the long term. That includes generous family planning support, caregiver support, and strong cash compensation with great equity upside
• We look after our crew when they’re in the office too. Our famous food program is a great example, featuring a daily changing menu of local and sustainable dishes
• There’s a busy calendar of social events at Zoox, with more sports teams than you can count. And, of course, playing with robots is an important part of the job description- Assist analyzing large-scale driving and simulation datasets to identify trends, edge cases, and opportunities to improve autonomy performance
• Solid data manipulation understanding (e.g., SQL, PySpark, Scala)
• Comfort operating independently under high uncertainty on open-ended problems
• Help work through ambiguous, open-ended problems with a researcher’s mindset and a bias toward rapid iteration
• Help communicate complex results, trade-offs, and uncertainty clearly to the team and stakeholders
• Strong programming skills in Python
• Solid foundation in statistics, machine learning, and risk or reliability modeling
• Currently pursuing a B.S. or M.S. in a relevant quantitative field (Engineering, Computer Science, Statistics, Physics, or similar)
• Able to commit a minimum of 20 hours per week
• Available to commit to a minimum three-month assignment
• Currently enrolled in a B.S. or M.S. program in a relevant discipline
• Must adhere with Zoox confidentiality requirements, including refraining from using or sharing proprietary company information outside of Zoox, such as in academic research, theses, publications, or presentations
• Able to work on-site at one of our office locations
• Genuine interest in autonomous vehicles and Zoox’s mission
• —-Program Requirements—-
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to convey complexity and ambiguity clearly
• Experience with safety, reliability, or risk modeling (e.g., survival analysis, Bayesian methods, causal inference)
• Experience with large-scale dataset management, data pipelines, or MLOps tooling
• Strong teamwork and collaboration skills
• Background in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or a related quantitative discipline
• Prior research experience taking ambiguous, end-to-end problems from zero to a result, independently