About the role
<div class="content-intro"><p>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.</p></div><p class="p2"><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">We are looking for an Autonomy Software Systems Engineer who can derive requirements from first principles for safe and mission-critical autonomous behavior across both commercial and defense applications. An ideal candidate will have a background in developing algorithms for autonomy or robotics in aerospace, defense, or automotive domains. This will be used to support our safety claims about safe perception, motion planning, and control for autonomous robots deployed in both commercial freight and defense logistics environments.</span></p> <p class="p2"><strong style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">In this role, you will:</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">Collaborate closely with Autonomy Software teams by using first-principles analysis to develop requirements for safe perception, localization, prediction, motion planning, and/or control algorithms.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">Identify edge cases that could help us expose weaknesses in our system prior to encountering them in on-road environments.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">Provide analysis to support complex autonomy system design trade-offs to inform system design decisions affecting safety and performance.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">Support development of simulation scenarios, structured track testing, on-road road testing, and hardware-in-the-loop testing.<