Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Core Connectivity

The role

You will design and build the data transport that moves information inside the vehicle and between the vehicle and the cloud. You will also lead technical direction for part of the stack and work with several teams.

What you will do

• Design and build low-latency inter-process and inter-host transport in C++, including zero-copy data paths, shared-memory buffers, and lock-free queues.
• Measure and reduce end-to-end latency and jitter as message volume grows.
• Make the transport hold up when processes crash or restart, hosts start out of order, and networks drop or delay packets.
• Chase fleet and simulation issues to root cause and fix them in the design.
• Build pub/sub and RPC messaging APIs that application teams can use without understanding the transport underneath.
• Evolve message schemas and the Protocol Buffers based serialization layer, and move existing users to new formats without breaking them.
• Set technical direction for a part of the stack and lead designs that span several teams.
• Own the roadmap and release commitments as team leader, and work with firmware, product security, simulation, manufacturing, and IT.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in computer science, electrical or computer engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of experience in software development.
• Strong modern C++ on Linux in large codebases with performance-critical paths.
• Background in transport or networking software, such as messaging systems, network protocols, or communication between distributed systems.
• Experience building low-latency systems and measuring and reducing tail latency, using zero-copy, shared memory, lock-free data structures, and cache-aware data layout.
• Solid systems fundamentals: concurrency, memory management, process lifecycle, sockets, and the Linux networking stack.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with shared-memory IPC, pub/sub or RPC middleware such as DDS, ROS 2, or iceoryx.
• Experience with serialization frameworks such as Protocol Buffers, nanopb, or FlatBuffers.
• Experience with PTP (IEEE 1588) or other time synchronization across machines.
• Experience with UDP multicast, MTU and fragmentation behavior, or time-sensitive networking.
• Robotics, automotive, aerospace, or another real-time or safety-relevant domain.

Before you apply

• You do not need to match every listed expectation to apply.
• Accommodations are available for the application and interview process: contact accommodations@zoox.com or your assigned recruiter.

About the company

Zoox is developing the first ground-up, fully autonomous vehicle fleet and the supporting ecosystem to bring it to market. It works at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and design to provide mobility-as-a-service in urban environments.