Contract Student Worker - Machine Learning Engineer - Data Mining & VLM (Full-time)

About the Role

Support Zoox's Rules of the Road (RotR) program, where a miner + LLM/VLM tooling method automatically mines and triages potential road-rule violation events from simulation and fleet data. The student will be helping create or improve the data miners that generate the candidate events, help develop and evaluate the VLM triagers — curating golden datasets, measuring precision/recall against expert triage, and extending automation to new regulations and data sources.

Responsibilities

• Develop and iterate data miners locating potential RotR Violations following SSO requirements
• Develop and iterate on VLM/LLM workflows and pipelines for classifying RotR events
• Curate golden datasets and evaluate triager precision/recall against human triage
• Extend triagers from simulation to fleet/service data
• Analyze error cases and translate findings into pipeline improvements

Required Qualifications

• Strong Python / PySpark / SQL skills
• Coursework in machine learning, computer vision, or NLP. Understanding of supervised learning, model evaluation, and common sources of dataset bias and label noise
• Hands-on experience building production LLM/VLM applications, including agentic workflows, RAG, tool calling, evaluation, and/or fine-tuning
• Familiarity with software-engineering practices such as Git, unit testing, debugging, and code reviews

Bonus Qualifications

• Strong Scala skills
• Experience with Spark optimization and distributed data-processing systems
• Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, mapping, or transportation-related datasets

Program Requirements

• Currently enrolled in a B.S. or M.S. program in a relevant discipline
• Experience evaluating multimodal or vision-language models
• Experience with prompt optimization, model fine-tuning, or human-in-the-loop ML systems
• Available to commit to a minimum three-month assignment
• Able to commit a minimum of 40 hours per week
• Able to work on-site at one of our office locations
• Must adhere to Zoox confidentiality requirements, including refraining from using or sharing proprietary company information outside of Zoox, such as in academic research, theses, publications, or presentations

*Note: This is a contract position; employment will be through a vendor contracted with Zoox.*