Zoox Software Engineer interview questions

15 Software Engineers have shared notes from their Zoox interviews, with the questions they were asked in each round. That is 56% of the 27 Zoox interview notes on Screna AI.

15 Software Engineer interview notes

Zoox·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Data engineering interview at Zoox centered on a single meaty data quality question over a credit card transaction schema. Pretty technical, felt more like a working session than a traditional interview.
  • Given a credit card transactions table and a vendors table, propose at least five data quality checks or validations. Cover things like integrity constraints, referential integrity, refund logic, invalid values, missing data, and anomaly detection. For at least two of your checks, write SQL that returns the failing rows.

“This question is bigger than it looks.”

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Zoox·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
SQL-heavy technical screen for a data engineer role at Zoox. Two questions, both involving the same transactions dataset, with the second one being a window function problem that I felt okay about but probably could've been cleaner.
  • Given a transactions table and a vendors table, write a SQL query to find the top 3 vendors by total purchase dollars in the last 2 years. Return vendor_id and total_dollars_charged, sorted highest to lowest.
  • Using the same dataset, for each (state_province, country) pair, find the top 3 vendors by total purchase dollars in the last 2 years. Return state_province, country, vendor_id, total_dollars, and vendor_rank. Use dense ranking so ties get the same rank.

“Pretty standard aggregation question.”

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Zoox·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Zoox SWE interview with a grid-based reachability problem. Clean problem once you see the trick, but I spent way too long overcomplicating it before the insight clicked.
  • An ice cream truck moves along a 2D integer grid and you're given its position at each time step. A second vehicle starts at the origin and can move one step in any cardinal direction or stay put each turn. Can the second vehicle ever occupy the same cell as the truck at the same time step?

“I went down a BFS path for a few minutes before realizing that was completely overkill.”

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Zoox·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
SQL-heavy technical screen for a data engineer role at Zoox. Three questions, all on the same transaction/vendor schema, escalating from a basic ranking query to anomaly detection. Nothing behavioral, just SQL the whole time.
  • Given a transactions table and a vendors table, find the top 3 vendors by total net revenue (purchases minus refunds) over the past two years.
  • For each state and city combination, find the top 3 vendors by total net revenue over the past two years.
  • Propose several data quality and anomaly checks for this transaction dataset, then write SQL queries to detect each issue. Think about things like invalid refund references, mismatched refund amounts, duplicate transaction IDs, vendors not in the vendor table, and unusual spikes in volume or amount.

“Pretty standard warm-up.”

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Zoox·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Zoox technical screen for a software engineer role, and it was basically a full self-driving simulation problem. You're coding a lane-change decision system with kinematics, controller functions, and a time-stepping loop. More involved than I expected for a phone screen.
  • Design and implement a lane-change feature for an autonomous vehicle that decides whether a lane change is safe, modulates acceleration when it isn't, and advances the full scene forward in time using longitudinal kinematics. You're given two controller functions and must use them without substituting your own control law.

“This is a meaty one.”

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Zoox·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
Zoox data engineering interview, system design round focused entirely on autonomous vehicle operations. Two meaty design problems back to back, both requiring you to think about real-time pipelines and operational metrics in a domain where the stakes are pretty literal. Felt like a solid interview but the scope was enormous for a single session.
  • Design a data model to monitor the efficiency and effectiveness of a teleoperations center, including core entities, table grains, relationships, and key metrics.
  • Design a data architecture and pipeline to measure vehicle stability across an autonomous robotaxi fleet, covering data sources, ingestion, storage, transformations, quality checks, metrics, and downstream consumers.

“This one took me a while to even figure out where to start.”

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Zoox·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Basic reasoning screen for a Data Engineer role at Zoox. Two questions, nothing technical in the traditional sense, more like a sanity check on whether you can think through simple problems out loud.
  • Why is summer generally hotter than winter?
  • If you invest $1,000 at a 100% annual interest rate, compounded once per year with no withdrawals, how much will you have after 20 years?

“Seemed too easy and I almost overthought it.”

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Zoox·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
System design round at Zoox for a software engineer role, focused entirely on designing a ride-hailing platform at Uber scale. Pretty dense session covering a lot of ground, from spatial indexing to payment consistency to surge pricing.
  • Design a large-scale ride-hailing platform like Uber, covering rider and driver matching, real-time location tracking, trip lifecycle management, fare estimation, and surge pricing.

“This is a beast of a question.”

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Zoox·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
SQL-heavy technical screen for a Data Engineer role at Zoox. One hour, two tables, three questions. The last one about data quality checks was the curveball I wasn't fully ready for.
  • Using a transactions table and a vendors table, write a SQL query to find the top 3 vendors by total amount charged over the past 2 years.
  • Extend the previous query: find the top 3 vendors by total amount charged, broken down by state and city, over the past 2 years.
  • Design a set of data quality and anomaly detection checks for this dataset, and write SQL queries to implement them.

“Pretty standard warm-up.”

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Zoox·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
SQL technical screen for a Data Engineer role at Zoox. Just one question from what I can tell, but it was a real query with specific filtering logic and expected output, not a vague 'write me some SQL' prompt.
  • Using a transactions table, write a query to find the top 3 vendors by total amount charged over the last 2 years.

“Pretty clear what they wanted once I saw the table structure.”

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