Software Engineering Manager - Perception Occupancy in Foster

Engineering Manager, Perception Occupancy and Rare Events

Zoox is reinventing personal transportation—making the future safer, cleaner, and more enjoyable. We’ve created a vehicle specifically for dense, complicated urban environments with bidirectional driving capabilities and four‑wheel steering to maneuver through compact spaces without reversing. This role is part of the growing Perception team that builds a world‑class 3‑D environment model from multi‑modal sensor data.

In this role, you will:

• Lead Technical Strategy: Build and lead a team of managers and engineers responsible for core occupancy modeling and rare event detection, driving the team’s roadmap, productivity, and execution.
• Drive Model Evolution: Own the development and deployment of critical perception models, overseeing the consolidation of multi‑modal architectures and guiding technical design to enhance detection range, robustness and accuracy.
• Innovate with Advanced ML: Lead the adoption of state‑of‑the‑art computer vision and machine learning techniques—such as foundation models and efficient geometric representations—to improve performance on long‑tail classes and support geofence expansion and fleet size expansion.
• Collaborate on Simulation & Data: Collaborate cross‑functionally with simulation and data teams to leverage synthetic data and edge‑case scenarios, ensuring the perception system performs reliably in adverse weather and safety‑critical environments.
• Ensure Organizational Excellence: Drive organizational health by balancing technical leadership with people management, establishing best practices for data‑driven decision‑making, and enabling the team to scale effectively.

• Strong understanding of computer vision systems, AI software stacks, and sensor fusion across multiple modalities.
• 3+ years of technical leadership experience, 10+ years of experience in computer vision, machine learning and related fields.
• Strong leadership skills in recruiting, leading, growing, and managing technical team members in solving challenging problems, and building critical components of a real‑time system.
• Expertise in implementing autonomy solutions and deploying real‑world systems.
• Experience with recent AI approaches including VLM, LLM, Transformers and GenAI (3D/4D GS, Diffusion, NeRF).

• Familiarity with perception of autonomous vehicles or similar robots.
• Hands‑on experience having deployed real products or platforms into the real world, and intimately understanding the challenges of working with complex systems.
• Involvement in validation or evaluation of risk and/or safety‑critical systems.

There are three major components to compensation for this position: salary, Amazon Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), and Zoox Stock Appreciation Rights. A sign‑on bonus may be offered as part of the compensation package. The listed range applies only to the base salary. Compensation will vary based on geographic location and level. Leveling, as well as positioning within a level, is determined by a range of factors, including, but not limited to, a candidate's relevant years of experience, domain knowledge, and interview performance.

The salary range listed in this posting is representative of the range of levels Zoox is considering for this position.

Zoox also offers a comprehensive package of benefits, including paid time off (e.g., sick leave, vacation, bereavement), unpaid time off, Zoox Stock Appreciation Rights, Amazon RSUs, health insurance, long‑term care insurance, long‑term and short‑term insurance, and life insurance.