Contract Student Worker - Autonomy Safety Data Engineer

Role Overview

This role focuses on building a data-driven safety risk model that quantifies and improves autonomous-vehicle driving performance, along with the data analysis work that supports it. The student will work within the Safety Strategy & Operations team on a 6-month project spanning model development, empirical experimentation, and large-scale driving/simulation data analysis.

Responsibilities

• Support designing, building, and iterating on a data-driven safety risk model that quantifies driving performance and surfaces safety-relevant signals across the autonomy stack
• Assist developing and maintaining dataset management pipelines — curation, labeling, versioning, and quality checks — that feed the risk model and downstream analyses
• Support defining and running empirical experiments that “show it with data” rather than relying on assumptions

Required Qualifications

• Assist analyzing large-scale driving and simulation datasets to identify trends, edge cases, and opportunities to improve autonomy performance
• Currently pursuing a B.S. or M.S. in a relevant quantitative field (Engineering, Computer Science, Statistics, Physics, or similar)
• Strong programming skills in Python
• Help work through ambiguous, open-ended problems with a researcher’s mindset and a bias toward rapid iteration
• Solid data manipulation understanding (e.g., SQL, PySpark, Scala)
• Solid foundation in statistics, machine learning, and risk or reliability modeling
• Help communicate complex results, trade-offs, and uncertainty clearly to the team and stakeholders
• Comfort operating independently under high uncertainty on open-ended problems

Bonus Qualifications

• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to convey complexity and ambiguity clearly
• Experience with safety, reliability, or risk modeling (e.g., survival analysis, Bayesian methods, causal inference)
• Experience with large-scale dataset management, data pipelines, or MLOps tooling
• Strong teamwork and collaboration skills
• Background in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or a related quantitative discipline
• Prior research experience taking ambiguous, end-to-end problems from zero to a result, independently

Program Requirements

• Genuine interest in autonomous vehicles and Zoox’s mission
• Currently enrolled in a B.S. or M.S. program in a relevant discipline.
• Available to commit to a minimum three-month assignment.
• Able to commit a minimum of 20 hours per week.
• Able to work on-site at one of our office locations.
• Must adhere with Zoox confidentiality requirements, including refraining from using or sharing proprietary company information outside of Zoox, such as in academic research, theses, publications, or presentations.

This is not an internship. The Contract Student Worker Program is designed to complement your academic experience by providing meaningful, ongoing work alongside your studies. Rather than participating in a cohort-based program, you'll join a team directly and contribute to real projects with real impact. While the program does not include structured intern programming or a pathway to full-time employment, it offers valuable opportunities to learn, develop new skills, and gain hands-on experience in a professional environment.

Compensation for this role is $30/hour.

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.