Software Engineer, ML Inference Optimization

Zoox is hiring a Software Engineer, ML Inference Optimization in Foster City, United States. It pays $177k-$270k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.

Level's read on this job

Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
Pay on this posting starts 5% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
Zoox has 237 other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

Zoox is on a mission to reimagine transportation and ground-up build autonomous robotaxis that are safe, reliable, clean, and enjoyable for everyone. We are still in the early stages of deploying our robotaxis on public roads, and it is a great time to join Zoox and have a significant impact in executing this mission. The ML Platform team at Zoox plays a crucial role in enabling innovations in large-scale Foundation models, VLMs, and VLAs to make autonomous driving as seamless as possible. The Opportunity Are you excited to drive our ML Inference Optimization initiatives and make our ML models that enable autonomous driving as fast and efficient as possible? You will get to work with SOTA accelerators, cutting-edge techniques in distributed training, quantization, distillation, and pruning, among other things, working closely with all the Autonomy teams within Zoox - Perception, Prediction, Planner, Simulation, Collision Avoidance, and have the opportunity to significantly push the boundaries of how ML is practiced within Zoox. We build and operate the base layer of ML tools, model development, and serving systems that our applied research teams use for in- and off-vehicle ML use cases. You will work alongside a team of strong software engineers and act as a force multiplier for our internal customers. This team has many growth opportunities as we expand our robotaxi deployments and venture into new ML domains. If you want to learn more about our stack behind autonomous driving, please look here. If you want to learn more about our ML Infrastructure, here is one of our past talks at re:Invent.

How we rate this

Software Engineer, ML Inference Optimization at Zoox rates 95 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. Open the description and count.

Key facts

Software Engineer, ML Inference Optimization is an open job at Zoox.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The listed salary is $177k-$270k a year.
The role is based in Foster City, CA.
The job was posted on May 28, 2026.
Applications are handled by Zoox. Apply on Zoox

Prepare for this job

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Pay

This job starts at: $177k
Typical software engineer job: $168k

This posting starts 5% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

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