Senior / Staff Software Engineer - Motion Planning

Hybrid

Posted 12 months ago

Software

Job Description

On the Motion Planning team at Zoox, you’ll be dedicated to improving the driving behaviors of the robot on public roads. The Planner's job is to figure out where the robot is going and how to get there safely in situations as complex as those found in Downtown San Francisco or on the Las Vegas Strip.

This is a cutting-edge problem, which requires teamwork and collaboration across a broad set of experts spanning Planner, Perception, Prediction, Operations, and more. Together, you will create the next generation of algorithmic improvements to expand our robot’s ability to drive in some of the most complex situations found on public roads.

Safety is foundational at Zoox, so you will take a measured approach – develop a principled modification to the Planner, test in simulation and on closed courses, and team up with our safety drivers for on-road testing.

Responsibilities

In this role, you will:

Create principled algorithmic improvements to specific areas of driving behavior and implement those changes in our code base.

Use our extensive backend tooling to test your changes across many different driving situations at the press of a button.

Lead on-vehicle drive reviews to generate actionable feedback on driving performance. Use this experience to help the team learn and make improvements.

Attend conferences and survey literature to stay informed on the most recent developments in the fields of Robotics and Motion Planning.

Write and file patents for novel technologies you develop.

Requirements

Qualifications

Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field and 8+ years of experience

Fluency in C++

Understanding of configuration spaces and a variety of planning techniques (A*, RRTs, PRMs, etc.)

Demonstrated ability to create real-time motion planning algorithms

Bonus Qualifications

Significant contributions to geometric- and/or sampling-based planning algorithms

Experience with autonomous robots and machine learning or data-driven development processes

Experience with ROS, pose estimation, SLAM, probabilistic filtering, 3D data, or CUDA

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About the job

Posted on: Nov 5, 2025
Job type: Full-time
Location: Foster City, CAHybrid

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Senior / Staff Software Engineer - Motion Planning

Job Description

Responsibilities

In this role, you will:

Requirements

Qualifications

Bonus Qualifications

Ready to Apply?

About the job

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