Software Engineer Intern, Autonomy Software [Summer 2027]

Job Description
Autonomy Software builds the software that lets the Zoox robotaxi perceive its surroundings, predict what others will do, and plan and control the vehicle with no one behind the wheel. Interns join one of the teams below, work with a mentor on an open research or engineering question, and see a direct path from their work to the system that runs on Zoox vehicles and in simulation.

Interns in this pipeline may be considered for opportunities across a range of teams, including:

• Autonomy Behaviors: Owns the decision-making, planning & control modules, which decide how the vehicle drives. Projects include machine-learned planning, long-horizon reasoning, configurable driving styles, freeway driving and new vehicle platform bring-up.

• Perception: Gives the vehicle an understanding of its surroundings using camera, lidar, radar and audio. Projects include object detection and tracking, multimodal foundation models, scene understanding, occupancy and 3D mapping.

• Guidance & Routing: Works on route-level planning and offline mapping, including the mission planner, map data delivery and road network tools.

• Collision Avoidance System: Runs an independent safety layer with its own perception and planning. This team also works on the evaluation and data tooling for verification.

In this Role, You Will...

• Work on interesting research or advanced engineering problems that could have the potential to revolutionize the existing Autonomy Software stack.
• Design, build and evaluate state-of-the-art algorithms or machine learning models for a real autonomous driving system.
• Train and test models on large-scale driving and simulation data, and analyze failure modes to measure improvements.
• Write production-quality C++ and Python that goes through code review.
• Present your results to your team and at the end-of-summer project showcase, and contribute to publishable research where the project allows.

Requirements

• Currently working towards a M.S. or Ph.D. in computer science, robotics, electrical engineering, or a related engineering program
• Expected to graduate between Fall 2027 and Summer 2028, and enrolled at an accredited college or university throughout the internship
• Able to commit to a full-time, 12-week internship beginning in May/June 2027
• Ability to relocate to the Bay Area, California, for the duration of the internship
• Interns at Zoox may not use any proprietary information they are working on as part of their thesis, any published work with their university, or to be distributed to anyone outside of Zoox

Qualifications

• Currently working towards a M.S. or Ph.D. in computer science, robotics, electrical engineering, or a related engineering program
• Strong programming skills in C++ and/or Python
• Solid computer science fundamentals, including data structures and algorithms
• Experience with PyTorch, Jax, Tensorflow, Numpy
• Experience in at least one of machine learning, computer vision, motion planning, controls, prediction or mapping
• Clear communication of technical results

Bonus Qualifications

• Publications in top ML or robotics conferences (e.g. NeurIPS, CVPR, ICRA)
• Experience with autonomous driving or learned robotic planning
• Experience with large-scale, multi-node training workloads