Staff Software Engineer, Planning Infrastructure

Kodiak•Mountain View, CA

About The Position

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 or Staff Software Engineer to build infrastructure, tools, and systems that help our Planning team develop, debug, evaluate, and deploy autonomy software faster and more safely. In this role, you will build the internal tools, libraries, workflows, metrics, and evaluation systems that support behavior and motion planning development. You will work closely with Planning engineers to understand their workflows and create infrastructure that improves engineering velocity, software quality, system performance, and test coverage. This is a great role for a strong generalist engineer who enjoys building systems that other engineers rely on every day.

Requirements

Strong software engineering background, 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 a desire to build tools that make other engineers more effective.

Responsibilities

Build tools and infrastructure that accelerate Planning development.
Improve testing, debugging, metrics, and evaluation workflows for the Planning team.
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.