Contract Student Worker - Machine Learning Engineer - Data Mining VLM (Full-time)
Role overview
Support Zoox's Rules of the Road (RotR) program, where a miner + LLM/VLM tooling method automatically mines and triages potential road-rule violation events from simulation and fleet data. The student will be helping create or improve the data miners that generate the candidate events, help develop and evaluate the VLM triagers — curating golden datasets, measuring precision/recall against expert triage, and extending automation to new regulations and data sources.
Responsibilities
- check_circle Develop and iterate data miners locating potential RotR Violations following SSO requirements
- check_circle Develop and iterate on VLM/LLM workflows and pipelines for classifying RotR events
- check_circle Curate golden datasets and evaluate triager precision/recall against human triage
Basic qualifications
- Extend triagers from simulation to fleet/service data
- Strong Python / Pyspark / SQL skills
- Coursework in machine learning, computer vision, or NLP. Understanding of supervised learning, model evaluation, and common sources of dataset bias and label noise.
- Analyze error cases and translate findings into pipeline improvements
- Hands-on experience building production LLM/VLM applications, including agentic workflows, RAG, tool calling, evaluation, and/or fine-tuning.
- Familiarity with software-engineering practices such as Git, unit testing, debugging, and code reviews.
Preferred qualifications
- Strong Scala skills.
- Experience with Spark optimization and distributed data-processing systems.
- Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, mapping, or transportation-related datasets.
Benefits
- check_circle Compensation for this role is $30/hour.
- check_circle This is a contract position; employment will be through a vendor contracted with Zoox. The hourly rate is as posted, and benefits eligibility is determined by the vendor.
About the company
About Zoox
Zoox is an autonomous ridehailing company building the world's first purpose-built robotaxi — fully electric, bidirectional, with no steering wheel or driver's seat. Backed by Amazon and founded to make transportation safer, cleaner, and more accessible, Zoox designs its vehicles entirely around the rider. We're currently operating in Las Vegas and San Francisco, with Austin and Miami on the horizon, and testing underway across seven U.S. markets.
About Our Part-Time Student Worker Program
Zoox's part-time student worker program puts you at the center of one of the most ambitious challenges in transportation. You'll contribute to real projects, work alongside engineers and researchers pushing the boundaries of autonomous technology, and gain experience that goes well beyond the classroom. We're looking for students who bring strong academic foundations, curiosity that doesn't stop at coursework, and a drive to be part of something that matters.
Zoox is developing the first ground-up, fully autonomous vehicle fleet and the supporting ecosystem required to bring this technology to market. Sitting at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and design, Zoox aims to provide the next generation of mobility-as-a-service in urban environments. We’re looking for top talent that shares our passion and wants to be part of a fast-moving and highly execution-oriented team.
Tags & Focus Areas
About Zoox
Staff Electrical Engineer - High Performance Compute
Ready to Join the Team?
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