Kodiak Robotics is an autonomous trucking company developing self-driving heavy vehicles and commercial logistics operations.
<div class="content-intro"><p>Kodiak Robotics, Inc. was founded in 2018 and has become a leader in autonomous ground transportation committed to a safer and more efficient future for all. The company has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) powered technology stack purpose-built for commercial trucking and the public sector. The company delivers freight daily for its customers across the southern United States using its autonomous technology. In 2024, Kodiak became the first known company to publicly announce delivering a driverless semi-truck to a customer. Kodiak is also leveraging its commercial self-driving software to develop, test and deploy autonomous capabilities for the U.S. Department of Defense.</p></div><p class="p1"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">We are seeking a Staff Autonomy Perception Engineer to join our Perception Engineering team. In this role, you will use your expertise in state estimation & multi object tracking to shape the perception stack as we scale, incorporating and developing state of the art algorithms and techniques. You’ll leverage advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) models and techniques to deploy and scale safe autonomous perception systems. If you're passionate about how robots perceive and understand the world at scale, this role is for you.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>What You'll Do</strong></span></p> <ul class="ul1"> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Define and lead the technical direction for learned scene estimation within the Kodiak Driver</span></li> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Architect and implement principled approaches for fusing information across multiple modalities: camera, radar, lidar, thermal, and IMU</span></li> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Lead improvements to multi-target tracking including track initiation, measurement-to-track association, and track state maintenance — with a focus on reliability in the hardest real-world conditions</span></li> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Develop novel algorithms that incorporate noisy, incomplete measurements into a robust foundational understanding of the world</span></li> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Build the tooling, metrics, and visualization infrastructure that lets the team move faster and evaluate progress rigorously</span></li> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Set a high technical standard across the Perception team through design reviews, code reviews, and mentorship</span></li> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Partner with teams across autonomy to ensure perception performance translates into system-wide safety and reliability</span></li> </ul> <p class="p3"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>What You'll Bring</strong></span></p> <ul class="ul1"> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">BS or MS with at least 8 years of industry experience, or PhD with at least 5 years, building and deploying state estimation and sensor fusion systems</span></li> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Deep domain expertise across sensor fusion, state estimation, Kalman filtering, particle filtering, and multi-object tracking</span></li> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Strong experience with deep learning and learned scene estimation — you know when to use classical methods and when learned approaches win</span></li> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Exceptional C++ skills and a track record of writing highly maintainable, production-quality code in high-reliability systems</span></li> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The ability to define metrics, design rigorous evaluations, and use data to make principled engineering decisions</span></li> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">A history of technical leadership — you have driven projects from ambiguous problem to shipped solution and raised the level of the teams around you</span></li> <li class="li2" style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Strong written and verbal communication; you write clear design docs and build alignment across disciplines</span></li> </ul> <p class="p4"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Bonus Points:</strong></s