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Salary: USD 240,000 - 265,000 / annual
Kodiak Robotics is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to build infrastructure, tools, and systems that enable the Planning team to develop, debug, evaluate, and deploy autonomous driving software faster and more safely. Founded in 2018, Kodiak has become a leader in autonomous ground transportation, delivering freight daily using its AI-powered technology stack for commercial trucking and the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2024, Kodiak became the first known company to publicly announce delivering a driverless semi-truck to a customer.
In this role, you will design and build internal tools, libraries, workflows, metrics, and evaluation systems that support behavior and motion planning development. You will work closely with Planning engineers to understand their workflows and create infrastructure that improves engineering velocity, software quality, system performance, and test coverage.
Key responsibilities include:
- Building tools and infrastructure that accelerate Planning development
- Improving testing, debugging, metrics, and evaluation workflows for the Planning team
- Exposing actionable insights from logs, simulation, and real-world autonomy data
- Building infrastructure that supports safety case development and test coverage analysis
- Improving internal libraries, developer workflows, and planning observability
- Optimizing performance, maintainability, and reliability of planning software
- Partnering closely with Planning engineers to identify bottlenecks and improve development velocity
- Designing reusable systems and abstractions used across the Planning team
- Leading infrastructure projects with broad team-wide impact
Required qualifications:
- Strong software engineering background with experience in C++ performance optimization and large-scale software systems
- Experience building tools, libraries, frameworks, infrastructure, or developer workflows
- Ability to write clean, maintainable, high-performance code
- Experience with metrics, logs, testing, debugging tools, simulation, or data-driven evaluation
- Strong systems thinking and ability to understand complex engineering workflows
- Interest in autonomy, robotics, or planning systems
- Strong collaboration skills and desire to build tools that make other engineers more effective
This is an ideal role for a strong generalist engineer who enjoys building systems that other engineers rely on every day.
