Contract Student Worker - Autonomy Safety Data Engineer at Zoox

Role Overview

This role focuses on building a data-driven safety risk model that quantifies and improves autonomous-vehicle driving performance, along with the data analysis work that supports it. The student will work within the Safety Strategy & Operations team on a 6-month project spanning model development, empirical experimentation, and large-scale driving/simulation data analysis.

Responsibilities

• Support designing, building, and iterating on a data-driven safety risk model that quantifies driving performance and surfaces safety-relevant signals across the autonomy stack
• Assist developing and maintaining dataset management pipelines — curation, labeling, versioning, and quality checks — that feed the risk model and downstream analyses
• Support defining and running empirical experiments that “show it with data” rather than relying on assumptions

Required Qualifications

• Assist analyzing large-scale driving and simulation datasets to identify trends, edge cases, and opportunities to improve autonomy performance
• Currently pursuing a B.S. or M.S. in a relevant quantitative field (Engineering, Computer Science, Statistics, Physics, or similar)
• Strong programming skills in Python
• Help work through ambiguous, open-ended problems with a researcher’s mindset and a bias toward rapid iteration
• Solid data manipulation understanding (e.g., SQL, PySpark, Scala)
• Solid foundation in statistics, machine learning, and risk or reliability modeling
• Help communicate complex results, trade-offs, and uncertainty clearly to the team and stakeholders
• Comfort operating independently under high uncertainty on open-ended problems

Bonus Qualifications

• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to convey complexity and ambiguity clearly
• Experience with safety, reliability, or risk modeling (e.g., survival analysis, Bayesian methods, causal inference)
• Experience with large-scale dataset management, data pipelines, or MLOps tooling
• Strong teamwork and collaboration skills
• Background in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or a related quantitative discipline
• Prior research experience taking ambiguous, end-to-end problems from zero to a result, independently

Program Requirements

• Genuine interest in autonomous vehicles and Zoox’s mission
• Currently enrolled in a B.S. or M.S. program in a relevant discipline.
• Available to commit to a minimum three-month assignment.
• Able to commit a minimum of 20 hours per week.
• Able to work on-site at one of our office locations.
• Must adhere with Zoox confidentiality requirements, including refraining from using or sharing proprietary company information outside of Zoox, such as in academic research, theses, publications, or presentations.