Software Engineer - Planner Frameworks Pipeline
Zoox
Listing collected from Zoox's career site. NextChapter is independent of Zoox.
Foster City, CA · $177k–$270k a year · Posted May 12, 2026
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Where Foster City, CA ranks
Where Foster City, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Best cities for pay after cost of living$209k · of 100
- #1Best cities for pay after cost of living in the West Coast$209k · of 39
- #1Best cities for pay after cost of living in California$209k · of 32
- #1Best cities for director and executive jobs in the West Coast38% · of 71
- #1Best cities for data and analytics pay after cost of living$232k · of 28
- #1Best cities for technology pay after cost of living$209k · of 80
Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
Pay compared with the market
This listing pays about $223,500 a year. Across 475 open software engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $159,500 to $238,500 and the median is $197,500. That is inside the middle half of those listings, 13% above the median.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among software developers, AI is already used for some of the tasks. Measured exposure for software developers: 29% (some).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
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About the job
Zoox is looking for an experienced software engineer to work on large-scale simulation pipelines used to validate the behavior of the Zoox self-driving vehicle. These are data and GPU intensive workloads built on Ray.io and Kubernetes. Given the massive scale and criticality of these pipelines, ensuring their reliability and efficiency has a significant impact on the company's ability to safely and quickly iterate on autonomy development. We are a small, scrappy team within the larger Autonomy organization. Although this role primarily involves off-vehicle pipelines, you will work closely with engineers developing the on-vehicle algorithms and models in our autonomy stack. We stay close to the end users - autonomy engineers - and think about the end to end use case for these validation pipelines. This is a hands-on role with a high degree of independence and ownership. You will be expected to contribute towards the framework’s architecture, reliability, efficiency, and grow its capabilities to support new use cases. You should have a track record of keeping production systems running with high availability. Experience with robotics or autonomous systems is not required but an understanding of the robotic data lifecycle is preferred.
In this role, you will:
Improve the cost efficiency, reliability, and performance of our validation and simulation pipelines
Create production-grade APIs, SDKs, and tools to enable a varied set of validations of autonomous behaviors
Improve the ML training pipelines supporting the autonomous behavior org
Qualifications
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field and 6+ years of industry experience
Experience optimizing large-scale distributed systems for cost and efficiency
Experience with AWS or similar providers
Proficiency with Python and familiarity with C++
Bonus Qualifications
Exposure to machine learning workloads (training, inference, data generation) from a cost optimization perspective
Background in algorithmic optimization or performance investigation
Experience with Ray.io, particularly Ray Core and Ray Data