Tech Lead Manager, Motion Planning

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.

Kodiak is recruiting a Tech Lead Manager to lead motion planning and prediction for Kodiak driverless trucks. The role combines technical leadership with people management, and provides scope and visibility to create the roadmap for the entire motion planning stack, including behavior planning, trajectory generation, mission commanding, and prediction.

This is an opportunity to collaborate with Product, Perception, Controls, and other cross-functional teams in order to improve overall autonomy performance. Customers interact with Kodiak trucks through mission assignments, making this a key engineering position to achieve product excellence.

The team’s responsibilities span the full range of the motion planning and prediction domain, from routing to decision-making to optimization. The planning and prediction stack utilizes both conventional and learned approaches. 

In this role, you will:

• Lead and grow a team of engineers building motion planning and prediction for driverless operation on public roads
• Set the technical direction and long-term roadmap and architecture for motion planning
• Identify metrics to orient engineering teams toward product excellence
• Study the product for opportunities to delight our customers
• Manage, mentor, and develop engineers at all levels: set expectations, give regular feedback, support career growth, and raise the bar for engineering excellence
• Hire and onboard top engineering talent, and build a collaborative, inclusive team culture
• Prioritize and plan team work, balancing roadmap commitments, technical debt, and operational needs
• Integrate onboard and offboard driving logic
• Automate and expedite truck launches and landings
• Partner cross-functionally with Perception, Controls, Systems, Simulation, and Product teams to define interfaces, requirements, and system behavior
• Solve difficult real-world problems involving highways, surface streets, and open, unstructured environments!

What you’ll bring:

• Experience managing or mentoring engineers, with a record of growing and retaining strong teams
• 6+ years of experience developing production-level robotics software
• Strong facility with modern C++ and the ability to guide design and review code
• Expertise in motion planning, including one or more of: computation geometry, graph theory, numerical optimization, or machine learning
• Track record of leading teams to deliver complex autonomous systems
• Leadership to guide the team through ambiguous, real-world challenges

Bonus points if you have:

• Deployed software on autonomous vehicles
• Built a safety case for driverless autonomy
• Improved system performance (latency, throughput, reliability) in production environments
• Built on simulation frameworks