Senior Autonomy Engineer

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.

of Defense.

This role demands deep technical expertise, mathematical rigor, and first-principles thinking to ensure safety in autonomous driving.

You will own critical elements of our overall safety strategy to deliver safe, transformative autonomous trucking systems.

The Autonomy Safety team is charged with an incredibly challenging task: how to make — and prove — that an autonomous truck is incredibly safe (fewer than one fatal collision per 108 hours).

There is no textbook for this problem.

You will be part of a small, high-impact team working at the frontier of safety, leveraging existing methods and pioneering new ones when needed.

• Write C++ to efficiently search high-dimensional failure spaces at scale
• Use first-principles analysis to develop requirements for safe perception, localization, prediction, motion planning, and control, collaborating directly with the Autonomy Software teams building those systems
• Identify failure modes and edge cases that expose weaknesses in our system before they appear in on-road environments.
• Perform hazard analysis, risk assessments, and fault tree analysis that feed directly into our safety case and drive system design decisions