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Engineering Manager, ML Performance Optimization

Zoox · Foster City, CA

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Level
Manager
Team
Manufacturing
Experience asked
8+ years
Industry
Automotive
Posted
17 days ago

The role in 30 seconds

A management manufacturing role at Zoox (automotive) in Foster City, CA.

They ask for
8+ years
Tools it names
Validation (IQ/OQ/PQ)

Read from the posting. The full description is below.

From the plant jobs report · week of October 19, 2026

Manufacturing Engineer roles in California: typical posted base $114k–$167k.

Median of the low and high ends of 117 live postings that list pay, out of 320 manufacturing engineer openings in California, read from manufacturers' own careers sites.

California plant jobs report →Pay by team and state →What moves pay →

How this role compares

Against 319 other live manufacturing postings in California.

Base pay
Not listed in this posting

Typical $111k–$157k, from 105 postings that list pay.

Experience asked
More than usual (8+ vs 5+)

Similar roles usually ask 5+ years.

Skills these teams ask for most

  • Tooling 53%
  • New product launch 51%
  • Root cause 40%
  • Automation 35%
  • Machining 29%
  • CATIA / NX 29%

✓ = this posting asks for it too. % = share of similar postings that mention it.

It asks for 8+ years. If you're close, apply anyway: requirements are a wish list. Talk to someone doing this work there first.

At a glance

Pulled from the posting text. If it's not listed here, the posting didn't say.

How to get in at this plant

Five moves over a week or two. The first one takes ten minutes.

  1. 1

    Pick 2–3 people on the Manufacturing team at Zoox

    We found 5 people at this company and state: 2 in this kind of role, 3 leaders, plus 1 likely hiring manager. Engineers who joined in the last year or two reply the most. See them ↓

  2. 2

    Send a short, curious note

    One real question about their work. No favors yet. Each person gets a different note, written for this role.

    Write to Joshua → (free)
  3. 3

    Turn a reply into a short call

    Questions worth asking about this team:

    • What does a normal week look like on your team?
    • Is the work mostly new product launches or sustaining existing lines?
    • How much time do you spend on the floor versus at a desk?
    • How did you land the job? What stood out in your interviews?
  4. 4

    Apply with someone vouching for you

    If the call went well, ask whether they’d pass your résumé to the hiring manager. Send your résumé link, apply that day, and let them know.

  5. 5

    Bring proof to the interview

    One page of before-and-after numbers from projects you led: scrap, OEE, cycle time, cost. Plant managers hire on results.

This plant: Zoox in Foster City

13 other open roles at this site · 5 people we found in manufacturing roles at Zoox.

All 14 roles at Zoox →
Full description from ZooxAs posted on their careers site.Show

In this role, you will

Vision: Develop and execute a strategic vision and roadmap for ML Training and Inference Performance Optimization, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance to support autonomous driving.

Technical acumen: Lead the design, implementation, and operation of a robust and efficient ML platform to enable the training, validation, serving, optimization and monitoring of ML models.

ML Performance Optimization: Drive end-to-end performance optimization for large-scale model training and inference, including distributed training efficiency, GPU utilization, memory and communication optimization, model compression (quantization, pruning, distillation), and low-latency on-vehicle inference that meets strict real-time and compute budgets.

Hiring: Attract, hire, and inspire a diverse world-class engineering team, fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence.

Partnership: Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including ML researchers, software engineers, data engineers, and hardware engineers, to define

requirements

and align on architectural decisions.

Mentorship: Enable engineers on the team to grow their careers by providing the right opportunities and clear, timely feedback.

Qualifications

  • ✓8+ years of relevant experience, including 3+ years of management experience managing engineers.
  • ✓Strong technical background in ML performance optimization, such as distributed training strategies (data, tensor, pipeline parallelism, FSDP/ZeRO), mixed-precision training, kernel-level optimization (CUDA, Triton), compiler stacks (torch.compile, XLA, TVM), quantization, and profiling/benchmarking across GPU and embedded accelerators.
  • ✓Experience building user-friendly ML Infrastructure that enabled large-scale model training and high-throughput, low-latency serving use cases.
  • ✓Experience with training frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, etc., leveraging GPUs for distributed model training.
  • ✓Experience with GPU-accelerated inference using TensorRT, Ray Serve, or similar frameworks.
  • ✓Proven track record of extensive cross-functional collaboration, partnering with research, product, hardware, and platform teams to align priorities, influence technical direction, and deliver measurable performance improvements across organizational boundaries.
Show full description ↓

Zoox is on a mission to reimagine transportation and build autonomous robotaxis from the ground up that are safe, reliable, clean, and enjoyable for everyone. With bidirectional driving capabilities and four-wheel steering, our vehicle allows us to maneuver through compact spaces and change directions without needing to reverse. We are at a critical inflection point as we scale our robotaxi deployment, and it is a great time to join Zoox and have a significant impact on executing our mission.

Our growing ML performance engineering leadership team is looking for an Engineering Manager, ML Performance Optimization. The centralized ML performance team at Zoox plays a crucial role in enabling innovations across all our ML research teams to develop and deploy models across our robotaxi and cloud infrastructure and to advance cutting-edge training and inference optimization techniques.

The Opportunity

We are working on many interesting challenges to enable rapid experimentation and scale our multi-modal Foundation models and RL infrastructure, and ensure these models run efficiently on our vehicles, meeting our latency targets. You will get to work across all ML teams within Zoox - Perception, Prediction, Planner, Simulation and our Advanced Hardware Engineering group, and have the opportunity to significantly push the boundaries of ML scaling and acceleration at Zoox.

You will lead a team of strong ML performance engineers and this team has many growth opportunities as we expand our geofences at U.S markets and venture into new ML domains. If you want to learn more about our ML Infrastructure, here is one of our past talks at re:Invent.

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