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Salary: USD 200,000 - 260,000 / annual
Kodiak Robotics is seeking a Staff Engineer for its Calibration, Localization and Mapping (CLAM) team. The company, founded in 2018, is a leader in autonomous ground transportation with AI-powered technology for commercial trucking and public sector applications. Kodiak delivers freight daily using autonomous technology across the southern United States and became the first known company to publicly announce delivering a driverless semi-truck to a customer in 2024. The company also develops autonomous capabilities for the U.S. Department of Defense.
In this role, you will set the technical strategy and architecture for onboard navigation and pose estimation systems. You will lead the design and development of advanced sensor fusion and pose estimation approaches across IMU, camera, and lidar sensors, anticipating failure modes before they arise in the field. You will drive the direction of visual and lidar odometry algorithms, including evaluating build-vs-adopt tradeoffs for new techniques. You will define and evangelize navigation metrics and evaluation methodology used across the organization to assess algorithm and system performance. You will serve as a technical escalation point for complex, ambiguous, or cross-cutting localization problems. Additionally, you will evaluate sensor performance and optimize sensor selection, and verify correct sensor calibrations, settings, and uncertainty characterizations.
This is a technical leadership role where you will set direction across the team and organization while remaining hands-on and contributing to core technical work.
REQUIREMENTS:
- BS, MS, or PhD with academic or industry experience in building navigation, localization, and odometry systems
- Expert in C++ with strong problem-solving skills
- Strong software engineering skills and experience building high-reliability deployed applications; ability to write well-designed, highly maintainable code
- Deep experience transforming raw sensor data from GNSS, IMU, wheel speed, etc. into 6-DOF pose using Kalman Filtering, factor graphs, or comparable state estimation techniques
- Experience with computer vision, visual odometry, and/or odometry from point clouds
- History of mentoring engineers and elevating the technical practices of a team
- Team player with ownership mentality and interest in system-wide performance across engineering disciplines
- Ability to build and iterate quickly; comfortable defining and building lasting infrastructure components from scratch
- Hands-on, curious, flexible, and interested in expanding horizons to provide complete system-wide solutions
- Strong communicator with experience writing clear, concise design documentation
