Machine Learning Engineer - ML Agents and Planning at Zoox
Foster City, MI
$189,000–$270,000
Jul 22, 2026
Foster City, MI
Jul 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This role sits within an autonomous vehicle team focused on off-vehicle machine learning for agent behavior and ego-vehicle planning. Day-to-day work involves building deep learning models using imitation and reinforcement learning to generate human-like driving plans, developing quality-estimation techniques across safety and comfort dimensions, and contributing to large-scale ML infrastructure. It suits researchers or engineers with strong backgrounds in prediction, planning, and transformer-based architectures.
Senior level · 5+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Master's required · Full-time
Pay in the description: $189,000–$270,000
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 140 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (data scientists). range 50–180
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $189,150 (middle half $152,859–$224,286). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The degree requirement is a hard gate with two paths: a PhD, OR a Master's degree plus 5+ years of professional experience. The minimum formal degree is therefore Master's; the 5-year experience figure applies only to the Master's path and is set as the overall years minimum accordingly.
Zoox is headquartered in Foster City, CA (San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara CBSA). No explicit remote option is stated.
The role sits at the intersection of ML research and engineering (Foundation Models, RL, imitation learning for autonomous driving). 15-2051 Data Scientists is chosen as primary given the heavy modeling/research emphasis; 15-1252 Software Developers is a credible runner-up given the production ML pipeline and infrastructure responsibilities.
The compensation range ($189K–$270K base) is described as spanning multiple levels Zoox is considering; actual placement will vary by level and geography. RSUs and Stock Appreciation Rights are additional components not reflected in the listed range.
Top-tier publications (NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR) are listed under 'Bonus Qualifications' and are not captured as skills since they are not a named technology or tool.
Imitation Learning and Deep Learning appear in the role's responsibilities narrative rather than the formal Qualifications block, so they are marked as preferred.
Read the full posting
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