Director, Perception

We’re reinventing personal transportation-making the future safer, cleaner, and more enjoyable. We’ve created our vehicle specifically for dense, complicated urban environments. Zoox is the only driving vehicle on the market with bidirectional driving capabilities and four-wheel steering, allowing us to maneuver through compact spaces and change directions without the need to reverse. The future is for riders!

Our growing software engineering leadership team is searching for a Director of Perception. Our perception stack is responsible for building Zoox’s world-class 3D environment model from multi-modal sensor data. We create novel AI architectures that combine the latest academic results with many in-house innovations in creative ways. Our algorithms are relentlessly optimized and tuned to run efficiently and effectively on a wide variety of real-life data as well as in simulation.

You will be responsible for leading high-impact Perception teams with their technical roadmap and milestone goals. You will be closely collaborating with other AI and SW leaders, simulation, and our systems design and mission assurance teams to deliver an exceptional dynamic objects perception system encompassing modalities such as vision, lidar, radar and long-wave IR across pipelines such as segmentation, detection, classification, fusion and tracking. You will lead a diverse, experienced team with a rapidly growing scope and responsibility while also working on some of the most complex problems in artificial intelligence, perception, and sensor fusion.

In this role, you will:

• Build and lead a group of managers and engineers, and be responsible for the team’s roadmap, productivity, execution and impact within the company.
• Set the vision for, grow, and lead a team of talented software engineers in the overall planning, execution, and success of complex technical projects, while providing the team with technical leadership.
• Collaborate with engineers and leaders across a variety of teams to brainstorm and accelerate the development of perception capabilities.
• Provide clear summaries, progress, and recommendations to our executive leadership team.
• Establishing best practices and statistical rigor around data-driven decision-making.
• Stay on top of industry and academic trends in AI and perception, making sure Zoox remains at the cutting edge of both algorithms and their implementation at scale.

Qualifications

• Strong understanding of computer vision systems and AI software stacks.
• 8+ years of extensive leadership experience, leading teams of 40+
• 10+ years of experience in computer vision, machine learning and related technologies.
• Strong leadership skills suitable for recruiting, leading, growing, and managing technical team members in solving a challenging problem, and building a critical component of a real-time system.
• Recent experience in implementing vision & perception algorithms.
• Expertise in implementing autonomy solutions and deploying real-world systems.
• Experience with recent AI approaches including E2E models for perception, transformers and sparse networks.
• Experience with sensor fusion and uncertainty modeling across multiple modalities.
• Strong presentation and communication skills.
• MSc or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science or related fields.

Bonus Qualifications

• 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
• Knowledge of GPU and/or TPU programming (CUDA, TensorRT, etc.)