Technical Lead, Multimodal Transformers
About The Position
Kodiak Robotics, Inc. is a leader in autonomous ground transportation, developing an AI-powered technology stack for commercial trucking and the public sector. The company delivers freight daily using its autonomous technology and is a pioneer in driverless semi-truck delivery. Kodiak is also applying its self-driving software for the U.S. Department of Defense. The company's autonomy stack utilizes AI that fuses diverse sensor streams into a unified understanding of the world. This role focuses on GigaFusionNet, a large-scale multimodal transformer that learns joint representations across camera, LiDAR, and radar through attention-based fusion. The technical leader will own the architecture direction and grow the engineering team for this effort.
Requirements
- 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
Responsibilities
- 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
Benefits
- Competitive compensation package including equity and annual bonuses
- Excellent Medical, Dental, and Vision plans
- Medical plan with infertility benefits
- MetLife Legal Services
- Identity & Fraud Protection
- Hospital Indemnity Insurance
- Accident Insurance
- Critical Illness Insurance
- Flexible PTO
- 10 paid holidays
- Generous parental leave policies
- Dog-friendly office
- Free catered lunch
- Fully stocked kitchen
- 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 benefits
- FSA
- Dependent Care FSA
- HSA
- Various incentive programs (referral bonuses, patent bonuses, etc.)
- Visa sponsorship for eligible candidates
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
Ph.D. or professional degree
