Staff Software Engineer (Mission Planning)

• Kodiak is recruiting a Staff Software Engineer to lead design and development of mission planning, routing, and human-assisted autonomy for Kodiak driverless trucks. The role provides scope and visibility to influence the roadmap for the entire motion planning stack, including behavior, prediction, and trajectory generation
• This is an opportunity to collaborate with Product, Perception, Controls, and other cross-functional teams in order to improve overall autonomy performance. Customers interact with Kodiak trucks through mission assignments, making this a key engineering position to achieve product excellence
• The role spans a range of motion planning responsibilities, from graph traversal and routing, to mission planning and product development, to human-assisted autonomy and operations
• Lead the design and development of mission planning, routing, and human-assisted autonomy for driverless operation on public roads
• Develop the architecture and long-term roadmap for motion planning
• Identify metrics to orient engineering teams toward product excellence
• Study the product for opportunities to delight our customers
• Mentor and provide technical leadership to junior and senior engineers, raising the bar for engineering excellence across the engineering organization
• Integrate onboard and offboard driving logic
• Collaborate with human-assisted autonomy and operations specialists to facilitate safe, efficient missions
• Evaluate the effectiveness of the Kodiak Driver
• Automate and expedite truck launches and landings
• Partner cross-functionally with Perception, Controls, Systems, Simulation, and Product teams to define interfaces, requirements, and system behavior
• Solve difficult real-world problems involving route generation, mission updates, responsive driving, real-time and cloud computing, and more!

Benefits

• Remote-friendly work environment
• 401k
• Generous PTO policy
• Life insurance
• Assortment of medical (PPO/HMO/HDHP), dental, vision, and FSA plans
• Family-friendly company events
• Dog-friendly office
• Employee-driven fitness classes
• Beautiful, renovated facilities in Mountain View, CA and Lancaster, TX
• Free EV charging
• Trivia and board game nights- Strong facility with modern C++
• 6+ years of experience developing production-level robotics software
• Leadership through ambiguous, unsolved challenges
• Delivery of complex autonomous systems
• Expertise in motion planning, trajectory optimization, graph theory, and related domains
• Experience deploying software on driverless autonomous vehicles
• Experience improving system performance (latency, throughput, reliability) in production environments
• Familiarity with simulation frameworks and data-driven development workflows
• A track record of mentoring engineers