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Kodiak Robotics is seeking a Technical Lead for Multimodal Transformers to own the architecture direction of GigaFusionNet, a large-scale multimodal transformer that fuses camera, LiDAR, and radar streams into unified representations for autonomous trucking. This is a senior individual contributor role with significant technical scope and mentorship responsibilities.
You will set the technical direction for multimodal fusion at Kodiak, lead the workstream executing against it, and be accountable for results landing on production trucks. Key responsibilities include: owning the architecture roadmap for multimodal transformers; leading projects end-to-end from problem framing through production deployment; driving research direction on cross-modal attention, token fusion strategies, and efficient multi-stream tokenization; setting technical bar through design and code reviews; mentoring junior and mid-level engineers; defining pretraining strategies including self-supervised and contrastive objectives; and partnering with perception, planning, and infrastructure leads to align model design with system-level latency and compute constraints.
Required qualifications: PhD with 5+ years industry experience (or MS/BS with 8+ years) in AI, Computer Science, or related field; track record leading multi-engineer technical efforts from research through production; deep expertise in transformer architectures, particularly multimodal or multi-stream settings; strong command of cross-attention, token fusion, and modality alignment techniques; experience mentoring engineers; expert proficiency in Python and PyTorch including large-scale distributed training and mixed-precision optimization; ability to influence technical direction across teams without formal authority; and passion for building AI that reasons over full sensory input for safe real-world operation.
Kodiak Robotics was founded in 2018 and is a leader in autonomous ground transportation. The company 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. Kodiak also develops autonomous capabilities for the U.S. Department of Defense.
