Senior/Staff Software Engineer, ML Inference Optimization

The Opportunity

Zoox is on a mission to reimagine transportation and ground-up build autonomous robotaxis that are safe, reliable, clean, and enjoyable for everyone. 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.

In this role, you will drive ML Inference Optimization initiatives to make autonomous driving models as fast and efficient as possible. You will work with SOTA accelerators, cutting-edge techniques in distributed training, quantization, distillation, and pruning, collaborating closely with Autonomy teams across Perception, Prediction, Planner, Simulation, and Collision Avoidance.

Responsibilities

• Develop and execute a strategic vision for the ML Inference Optimization team to unlock ML innovation in autonomous driving and rider experience.
• Lead the design, implementation, and operation of cutting-edge ML Training or Inference performance optimization techniques to scale VLM, VLA, and Foundational models and deploy them efficiently in robotaxis.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including ML researchers, software engineers, data engineers, and hardware engineers, to define requirements and align on architectural decisions.
• Enable engineers on the team to grow their careers by providing technical guidance and mentorship.

Qualifications

• Strong experience with training frameworks like PyTorch, leveraging GPUs efficiently for distributed model training.
• Experience with GPU-accelerated inference using TensorRT or similar frameworks.
• Experience using profiling tools like NVIDIA's Nsight or PyTorch's Profiler for identifying model training and serving bottlenecks.
• Proficient in Python and C++.
• Experience with model compression techniques to reduce model size and improve performance.

Bonus Qualifications

• 10+ years of total experience, including 4+ years of working on large-scale model training or inference platforms.
• Excellent leadership skills with a demonstrated ability to lead high-performing engineering teams.