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.
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to build infrastructure, tools, and systems that support our Planning team to develop, debug, evaluate, and deploy autonomy software faster and more safely.
You are part of the Planning team with a focus on understanding workflows and creating infrastructure that improves engineering velocity, software quality, system performance, and test coverage. You will develop the internal tools, libraries, workflows, metrics, and evaluation systems that support behavior and motion planning development.
This is a great role for a strong generalist engineer who enjoys building systems that other engineers work with on a daily basis. This role is especially well-suited for someone who enjoys multiplying the effectiveness of other engineers and wants broad technical impact.
What You’ll Do- Build tools and infrastructure that accelerate Planning development.
- Improve testing, debugging, metrics, and evaluation workflows.
- Expose actionable insights from logs, simulation, and real-world autonomy data.
- Build infrastructure that supports safety case development and test coverage analysis.
- Improve internal libraries, developer workflows, and Planning observability.
- Optimize performance, maintainability, and reliability of Planning software.
- Partner closely with Planning engineers to identify bottlenecks and improve development velocity.
- Design reusable systems and abstractions used across the Planning team.
- Lead infrastructure projects with broad team-wide impact.
- Strong software engineering background with 5+ years experience with C++ performance optimization and large-scale software systems, ideally with autonomy or robotics 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 interest to build tools that make other engineers more effective.
- Experience building safety-case tooling or test coverage infrastructure.
- Experience with large-scale autonomy metrics and evaluation systems.
The pay range listed below reflects the base salary in our SF/Silicon Valley location, across several internal levels. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors including: work location, experience, relevant training, education, skill level and performance during interview. Total compensation at Kodiak includes base pay, equity, bonus and a competitive benefits package
Skills Required
- 5+ years experience with 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 focus on enabling other engineers
- Experience building safety-case tooling or test coverage infrastructure
- Experience with large-scale autonomy metrics and evaluation systems
Kodiak Robotics Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Kodiak Robotics and has not been reviewed or approved by Kodiak Robotics.
-
Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is considered market-competitive for core engineering roles, with role postings indicating strong senior bands and offers aligned to autonomy peers. Salary ranges visible on listings reinforce competitiveness for experienced technical hires.
-
Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity grants are commonly included with standard multi‑year vesting, and listings frequently note salary plus bonus and equity as part of offers. This makes ownership a regular component of total rewards for technical hires.
-
Healthcare Strength — Health coverage includes medical, dental, and vision alongside life and short‑/long‑term disability, with FSA/HSA options available. Wellness partners such as mental‑health and primary‑care services are highlighted alongside core plans.
Kodiak Robotics Insights
What We Do
Kodiak Robotics is an autonomous technology company redefining the long-haul trucking industry. We believe self-driving trucks will be the first economically viable application of autonomous vehicle technology. We founded Kodiak in the spring of 2018 to make that belief a reality. Safety is our top priority. We are taking a safe and responsible approach to developing and testing our technology. We are proud to work with some of the best in the business. We’ve built a world class team of technologists from leading autonomous driving programs who know the industry inside and out. Our combined experience and commitment to the vision will allow us to put self-driving technology on the road in the safest and most effective way.
