{"id":105882,"url":"https://alion.io/job/zoox-senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-ml-agents-and-planning","title":"Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Behavior Models for Road Users","company":{"id":3626,"name":"Zoox","domain":"zoox.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/zoox","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":72,"open_postings":40,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.925,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":87,"computed_at":"2026-11-15T07:52:55Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Foster City, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":254000,"max":366000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":366000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Imitation Learning","optional":false},{"name":"JAX","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"ML-Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-12-17T17:58:37Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-12-17","last_verified_at":"2026-11-15T19:48:01Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":333,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":331},"description":"This role in the Offline Driving Intelligence team is responsible for developing/learning behavior models for road users such as cars, bicycles, and pedestrians. These agents populate Zoox's simulations and must be indistinguishable from real road users, yet fully controllable: promptable into the rare, adversarial, safety-critical behaviors we need to test against. This means the team’s models directly impact how fast Zoox can train, validate and ship its driving stack. Our team collaborates closely with Planner, Simulation and Validation teams to develop and validate our driving performance. As an ML Agents Machine Learning Engineer, you will work on the bleeding edge of the industry, developing novel machine learning pipelines and models to predict the behavior of other agents in the world and planning the best course of action for the ego vehicle.\nIn this role, you will...\nDevelop new deep learning models that use imitation learning and reinforcement learning to generate driving plans for human-like driving agents.\n\nWork on novel techniques to estimate the quality of those driving plans along the dimensions of safety, progress, comfort and realism.\n\nBuild generative behavior models (e.g. autoregressive, diffusion) that are conditionable on scenario intent - \"cut off the ego vehicle,\" \"jaywalk here\" - for targeted stress-testing.\n\nLeverage our compute, infrastructure and large corpus of data to push boundaries of the field.\n\nDevelop metrics and tools to analyze errors and understand improvements of our systems.\n\nCollaborate with engineers on Perception, Planning, Simulation, and Validation to solve the overall Autonomous Driving problem.\n\nQualifications\nPhD degree in computer science or related field and 4+ years of relevant professional experience or master's degree and 7+ years of relevant professional experience\n\nExperience in one of the following: Planning, Prediction, Reinforcement Learning, Imitation Learning, generative modeling (diffusion, autoregressive models)\n\nExperience with training and deploying transformer-based model architectures\n\nExperience with production Machine Learning pipelines: dataset creation, training frameworks, metrics pipelines\n\nFluency in Python ML frameworks and a basic understanding of C++\n\nBonus Qualifications\nTop tier publications (NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR)\n\nExperience with JAX","description_format":"text","description_chars":2351,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"master","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Autonomous Driving","Smart Mobility","Automotive Manufacturing","Ride Hailing"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2025-12-17T17:58:37Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"adverts_offering_sponsorship_24m":0,"sanctioned_now":false,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 373 · green card filings: 120","filings_12m":373,"filings_prev_12m":311,"green_card_filings_12m":120,"median_offered_wage_usd":181283,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-15T09:21:55+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, 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