Senior/Staff Software Engineer, HPC

Zoox is hiring a Senior/Staff Software Engineer, HPC in Foster City, United States. It pays $201k-$315k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Zoox.

Level's read on this job

Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
The listed pay starts 20% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
Level classifies it as a lead role.
Level lists 228 other open roles at Zoox.

AI in this role

Zoox is looking for an experienced Senior/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.

In this role, you will:

Design and implement core services and abstractions for distributed compute infrastructure supporting hundreds of 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

Qualifications

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, highly available scalable infrastructure
Demonstrated ability to prioritize development work and build cross-functional consensus around technical tradeoffs
Proficiency with Python

Bonus Qualifications

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

About Zoox Zoox is developing the first ground-up, fully autonomous vehicle fleet and the supporting ecosystem required to bring this technology to market. Sitting at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and design, Zoox aims to provide the next generation of mobility-as-a-service in urban environments. We’re looking for top talent that shares our passion and wants to be part of a fast-moving and highly execution-oriented team. Follow us on LinkedIn A Final Note: You do not need to match every listed expectation to apply for this position. Here at Zoox, we know that diverse perspectives foster the innovation we need to be successful, and we are committed to building a team that encompasses a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and skills.

How we rate this

Senior/Staff Software Engineer, HPC at Zoox rates 87 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.