Staff Software Engineer

Who you are

• Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems in production
• Experience with Ray.io, particularly Ray Core and Ray Data (or equivalent technologies)
• Experience with Kubernetes, particularly for heterogeneous workloads
• Experience with cloud infrastructure on AWS or similar providers
• Track record of shipping and operating reliable, scalable infrastructure
• Demonstrated ability to prioritize development work and build cross-functional consensus around technical tradeoffs
• Proficiency with Python
• Exposure to machine learning workloads (training, inference, data generation)
• Experience with Kubernetes or SLURM at scale (>10k+ nodes)
• Experience with SLURM workload manager and advanced scheduling policies
• Background in algorithmic optimization or operations research
• Experience building developer tools and platforms used by large engineering organizations

What the job involves

• Zoox is looking for an experienced Staff Software Engineer to build, scale, and operate our custom High-Performance Computing infrastructure. As Zoox scales its autonomous vehicle development, our HPC platform must keep pace with rapidly growing compute, storage, and scheduling demands across the company
• You will modernize our HPC platform—built on industry-leading technologies like Ray.io, SLURM, and Kubernetes—with a focus on reliability, scalability, and world-class developer velocity
• These HPC services form the backbone of development workflows across all Zoox software teams, from data engineering to training our AI models in Perception, Planner, Prediction, to Simulation, and more. You will have a direct impact on the productivity and effectiveness of every engineering team at Zoox
• The position comes with a high degree of independence and the opportunity to define Zoox's HPC platform strategy, both technically and organizationally. You will work closely with stakeholders in Autonomy and Software teams to understand their workload requirements and translate them into robust, scalable infrastructure
• Design and implement core services and abstractions for distributed compute infrastructure supporting thousands of concurrent jobs
• Work with customer teams and other infrastructure teams to build a multiyear software engineering roadmap for the HPC platform
• Lead multi-quarter, cross team initiatives that drive org-wide improvements
• Create production-grade APIs, SDKs, and tools that make it easy for engineers across Zoox to run large-scale distributed workloads
• Design and improve job scheduling algorithms and auto-scaling policies to maximize reliability and resource availability
• Design multi-region orchestration strategies that optimize for data locality, reliability, and performance
• Identify and resolve systemic reliability and performance issues through profiling, analysis, and collaboration with workload owners across multiple teams
• Evaluate new technologies and paradigms that improve Zoox's computational and storage capabilities
• Develop capacity planning tools and forecasting models to support Zoox's growing compute needs
• Mentor junior engineers, guiding them through their career development

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