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Technical Lead, Multimodal Transformers

Kodiak

Job Location:

Mountain View, CA - USA

Monthly Salary: $ 230000 - 300000

Posted: 13 August 2026 (4 hours ago)

Application Deadline: 10 November 2026

Vacancies: 1 Vacancy

Job Summary

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.

Kodiaks autonomy stack is built on AI that fuses diverse sensor streams into a unified actionable understanding of the world. We are developing GigaFusionNet a large-scale multimodal transformer that learns rich joint representations across camera LiDAR and radar through attention-based fusion. We are looking for a technical leader to own the architecture direction of this effort and grow the engineers building it.

This is a senior individual contributor role with significant scope. You will set technical direction for multimodal fusion at Kodiak lead the workstream executing against it and be accountable for the results landing on trucks.

In this role you will:

Own the architecture roadmap for multimodal transformers that fuse camera LiDAR and radar into unified representations
Lead the project end to end: problem framing experiment design implementation and production deployment
Drive research direction on cross-modal attention token fusion strategies and efficient multi-stream tokenization and make the calls on what gets built
Set the technical bar through design reviews code reviews and architectural decisions on scalable training pipelines
Mentor junior and mid-level engineers and raise the level of research execution across the org
Define the pretraining strategy including self-supervised and contrastive objectives that learn transferable multimodal representations
Partner with perception planning and infrastructure leads to align model design with system-level latency and compute budgets

What youll bring:

PhD with 5 years of industry experience or MS/BS with 8 years in AI Computer Science or a related field
Track record of leading multi-engineer technical efforts from research through production
Deep expertise in transformer architectures particularly in multimodal or multi-stream settings
Strong command of cross-attention token fusion and modality alignment techniques
Experience mentoring engineers and growing technical talent
Expert proficiency in Python and PyTorch including large-scale distributed training and mixed-precision optimization
Ability to influence technical direction across teams without formal authority
Passion for building AI that reasons over the full breadth of sensory input to operate safely in the real world

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)
Commuter FSA Dependent Care FSA HSA
Various incentive programs (referral bonuses patent bonuses etc.)

The pay range listed below reflects the base salaryin our SF/Silicon Valley locationacross 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

California Pay Range

$230000 - $300000 USD

At Kodiak we strive to build a diverse community working towards our common company goals in a safe and collaborative environment where harassment of any kind is strictly prohibited. Kodiak is committed to equal opportunity employment regardless of race ethnicity religion gender identity sexual orientation age disability or veteran status or any other basis protected by applicable law.

In alignment with its business operations Kodiak adheres to all relevant statutes regulations and administrative prerequisites. Accordingly roles that carry more sensitive requirements may be limited to candidates that can satisfy additional scrutiny and eligibility for such positions may hinge on verification of a candidates residence U.S. person status and/or citizenship status. Should the position require and Kodiak determines that a candidates residence U.S. person status and/or citizenship status necessitate an export license bar the candidate from the position or otherwise fall under national security-related restrictions Kodiak will consider the candidate for alternative positions unaffected by such restrictions under terms and conditions set forth at Kodiaks sole discretion or as an alternative opt not to proceed with the candidates application. If applicable Kodiak may provide visa sponsorship for eligible candidates.

We use a third-party AI tool (Endorsed) to assist in the initial screening of applications. As part of the evaluation process we provide Endorsed with job requirements and candidate-submitted applications. Final hiring decisions are made by our human recruitment team and no automated system makes the ultimate decision regarding hiring. Certain features of the platform may qualify it as an Automated Employment Decision Tool (AEDT) under applicable regulations. We began using Endorsed on January 1 2026. You can review the independent bias audit report covering our use of Endorsed here( By submitting your application you acknowledge that your application may be processed by AI systems as part of the screening and selection process. If you have any questions or would like to request a separate review of your application please contact with Separate Review Request in the email subject line.

Required Experience:

Senior IC

Apply Now

About Company

Kodiak

Our purpose-built autonomous solution, the Kodiak Driver, is the AV industry’s most advanced driverless technology, seamlessly integrating into any driving platform for reliable movement in any environment. Learn how we’re shaping the future of ground transportation.

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