Staff Software Engineer, Mission Planning

Customers interact with Kodiak trucks through mission assignments, making this a key engineering position to achieve product excellence.

The role spans a range of motion planning responsibilities, from graph traversal and routing, to mission planning and product development, to human-assisted autonomy and operations.

In this role, you will:

• Lead the design and development of mission planning, routing, and human-assisted autonomy for driverless operation on public roads
• Develop the architecture and long-term roadmap for motion planning
• Identify metrics to orient engineering teams toward product excellence
• Study the product for opportunities to delight our customers
• Mentor and provide technical leadership to junior and senior engineers, raising the bar for engineering excellence across the engineering organization
• Integrate onboard and offboard driving logic
• Collaborate with human-assisted autonomy and operations specialists to facilitate safe, efficient missions
• Evaluate the effectiveness of the Kodiak Driver
• Automate and expedite truck launches and landings
• Partner cross-functionally with Perception, Controls, Systems, Simulation, and Product teams to define interfaces, requirements, and system behavior
• Solve difficult real-world problems involving route generation, mission updates, responsive driving, real-time and cloud computing, and more!

What you’ll bring:

• 6+ years of experience developing production-level robotics software
• Strong facility with modern C++
• Expertise in motion planning, graph theory, distributed computing, and related domains
• Delivery of complex autonomous systems
• Leadership to solve ambiguous, real-world challenges

Bonus points if you have:

• Managed or mentored robotics engineers
• Deployed software on autonomous vehicles
• Built a safety case for driverless autonomy
• Improved system performance (latency, throughput, reliability) in production environments
• Built on simulation frameworks
• Based decisions on data analysis

What we offer:

• Competitive compensation package including equity and annual bonuses
• Excellent Medical, Dental, and Vision plans through Kaiser Permanente, Cigna, and MetLife (including a medical plan with infertility benefits)
• MetLife Legal Services, Identity & Fraud Protection, Hospital Indemnity Insurance, Accident Insurance, & Critical Illness Insurance
• Flexible PTO, 10 paid holidays, and generous parental leave policies
• Our office is centrally located in Mountain View, CA
• Office perks: dog-friendly, free catered lunch, a fully stocked kitchen, and free EV charging
• Long Term Disability, Short Term Disability, Life Insurance
• Wellbeing Benefits - Headspace through Cigna, Calm through Kaiser, One Medical, Gympass, Spring Health through Cigna, Rula (mental health navigation)
• Fidelity 401(k)