Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Planner Frameworks Pipeline

Zoox is hiring a Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Planner Frameworks Pipeline in Foster City, United States. It pays $254k-$350k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Zoox.

Level's read on this job

On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
Pay on this posting starts 52% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
Level classes it as a lead role.
Zoox has 228 other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

Zoox is looking for an experienced software engineer to work on large-scale simulation pipelines used to validate the behavior of the Zoox self-driving vehicle. These are data and GPU intensive workloads built on Ray.io and Kubernetes. Given the massive scale and criticality of these pipelines, ensuring their reliability and efficiency has a significant impact on the company's ability to safely and quickly iterate on autonomy development.

We are a small, scrappy team within the larger Autonomy organization. Although this role primarily involves off-vehicle pipelines, you will work closely with engineers developing the on-vehicle algorithms and models in our autonomy stack. We stay close to the end users - autonomy engineers - and think about the end to end use case for these validation pipelines.

This is a hands-on role with a high degree of independence and ownership. You will be expected to contribute towards the framework’s architecture, reliability, efficiency, and grow its capabilities to support new use cases. You should have a track record of keeping production systems running with high availability. Experience with robotics or autonomous systems is not required but an understanding of the robotic data lifecycle is preferred.

In this role, you will:

Improve the cost efficiency, reliability, and performance of our validation and simulation pipelines
Create production-grade APIs, SDKs, and tools to enable a varied set of validations of autonomous behaviors
Improve the ML training pipelines supporting the autonomous behavior org

Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field and 8+ years of industry experience
Experience optimizing large-scale distributed systems for cost and efficiency
Experience with AWS or similar providers
Proficiency with Python and familiarity with C++

Bonus Qualifications

Exposure to machine learning workloads (training, inference, data generation) from a cost optimization perspective
Background in algorithmic optimization or performance investigation
Experience with Ray.io, particularly Ray Core and Ray Data

How we rate this

Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Planner Frameworks Pipeline at Zoox rates 91 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.

Key facts

Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Planner Frameworks Pipeline is an open job at Zoox.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The listed salary is $254k-$350k a year.
The role is based in Foster City, CA.
The job was posted on June 16, 2026.
Seniority: lead.
Applications are handled by Zoox. Apply on Zoox