Chief Technology Officer

Kodama Systems Inc.•Birmingham, AL

1d•Remote

About The Position

Kodama is building autonomy and physical AI for heavy equipment operating in complex, unstructured environments. Today, we remotely operate forestry machines for paying customers, generating real-world training data from production operations. We are now building the autonomy stack to enable those machines to perform increasingly complex work independently. We are starting in forestry, where the work is physically demanding and dangerous, job sites are remote, and recruiting and retaining skilled workers is a persistent challenge. Forestry is also an important part of the U.S. economy and plays a critical role in climate and wildfire resilience.

Requirements

Deep experience with autonomous vehicles, autonomous machinery, or mobile robotics.
Experience leading and developing highly capable senior and staff engineers.
Strong judgment about the tradeoffs required to ship reliable robotic systems in the physical world.
The ability to communicate a clear technical vision internally and externally.
Low ego, high ownership, intellectual honesty, and comfort operating in a fast-moving environment.

Nice To Haves

Outdoor or off-road autonomy.
Experience with modern learning-based robotics, including world models, robot foundation models, generative policies, imitation learning, or reinforcement learning.
Safety-critical robotic or vehicle systems.
Experience as a CTO, VP of Engineering, senior engineering leader, or technical founder at a robotics or autonomous-systems company.

Responsibilities

Own Kodama’s technical strategy and engineering roadmap.
Lead and mentor a multidisciplinary team of five software engineers and two hardware engineers.
Drive the development and deployment of increasingly autonomous capabilities on heavy equipment operating in production.
Lead the development of safety-critical systems as autonomy expands.
Represent Kodama’s technology with investors, OEM partners, and other external stakeholders.