Software Engineer - Core Middleware

Shipping the software that powers Zoox's revolutionary autonomous vehicles is an extremely challenging job. As a Software Engineer on the Robotics Middleware team, you will be pivotal in designing and developing the middleware framework for our autonomous vehicle software stack. This role contributes to the entire software organization by seeking opportunities to make our software and engineering teams more efficient and productive. You will regularly tackle complex, cross-functional challenges that impact multiple teams, helping to ensure our stack remains robust, scalable, and safety-critical. This role demands strong expertise in real-time computing, cross-platform development, and abstraction layer design. You’ll be responsible for contributing to performance optimization and ensuring efficient, modular, and maintainable code. Your deep debugging and problem-solving skills will support high-quality solutions across our middleware. This position requires strong teamwork to collaborate on technical decisions, foster cross-functional partnerships, and uphold engineering best practices. Your excellence in technical communication, paired with your ability to balance technical precision with practical delivery, will ensure impactful outcomes across Zoox's software organization.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the technical direction and architecture of our robotics middleware platform and the runtime control system
• Develop and maintain platform-agnostic middleware components, including Robot state machine, software interfaces, task schedulers, data transport layers, diagnostic reporting, and message interfaces
• Participate in design reviews and code reviews to maintain high code quality and share knowledge
• Collaborate extensively with software teams across the organization to ensure the middleware meets all technical requirements
• Participate in technical forums, contribute to technical documentation, and adhere to established best practices

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software development experience

• Strong proficiency in modern C++ (C++14/17)

• Strong background in developing scalable, distributed applications in Linux and the Nvidia Drive platform

• Experience with GPU/CUDA programming

• Experience with robotics frameworks/middleware (e.g., ROS/ROS2)

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with different processor architectures (e.g., X86, ARM)
• Experience with AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code)
• Proven experience in high-performance, distributed, and resource-constrained software systems