Senior Software Engineer, Planning Infrastructure

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 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.

• 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.