Senior/Staff Software Engineer - ML/AI Applications

About the role

You will own end-to-end integration of a tool-centric agent runtime with external and internal agent clients, line of business backends, scheduled and interactive agent workloads, and cloud operations (Kubernetes, observability, secrets management).

Responsibilities

• Translate architecture and security intent into stable tool contracts, testable integration milestones, and repeatable releases.
• Be the primary engineer when issues sit at the boundary between product surfaces, platform services, and upstream systems.
• Own and lead integration strategy and execution across hosted services, shared libraries, standardized tool protocols (e.g., JSON-RPC over HTTP), REST APIs, and diverse callers (vendor agents, consoles, automation workers).
• Drive cross-functional delivery with backend API teams, partner agent owners, security, SRE/platform, and program management, ensuring formal sign-off where required.
• Debug and root-cause complex failures using structured logs, distributed traces, metrics, and gateway/session-token behavior, documenting durable mitigations and runbooks.
• Define and review all integration artifacts (contracts, allowlists, registry config, environment matrices, and interface assumptions) that upstream and downstream teams implement against.
• Contribute to release gating by ensuring container image promotion, configuration/secrets posture, smoke path execution for high-traffic flows, and disciplined branching/tagging for production intent.

Qualifications

• BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field with 7+ years of software engineering experience, strong in integration, platform, or backend roles.
• Strong Python (production services, async I/O, automated testing) and comfort in a large monorepo with CI-driven delivery.
• Deep experience with HTTP integration (REST/JSON-RPC, TLS, debugging under load) and shipping services on Kubernetes (deployments, health checks, troubleshooting).
• Auth integration experience: bearer tokens, JWT validation, OAuth2/OIDC or enterprise SSO concepts, and least-privilege scoping.

Bonus Qualifications

• Exposure to Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar agent tool-calling and orchestration models used in industry or internal platforms.
• Observability-led integration habits: metrics, traces, structured logging, and basic SLO or dashboard thinking for integration health.
• Background in security-sensitive integrations (data minimization, external partner access, review cycles with security or compliance).

Pay

$225,000 - $249,000 a year Base Salary Range

Schedule

Not specified

Benefits

There are three major components to compensation for this position: salary, Amazon Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), and Zoox Stock Appreciation Rights. A sign-on bonus may be offered as part of the compensation package. The listed range applies only to the base salary. Compensation will vary based on geographic location and level. Leveling, as well as positioning within a level, is determined by a range of factors, including, but not limited to, a candidate's relevant years of experience, domain knowledge, and interview performance. The salary range listed in this posting is representative of the range of levels Zoox is considering for this position. Zoox also offers a comprehensive package of benefits, including paid time off (e.g. sick leave, vacation, bereavement), unpaid time off, Zoox Stock Appreciation Rights, Amazon RSUs, health insurance, long-term care insurance, long-term and short-term disability insurance, and life insurance.