Senior Software Engineer, Planning Infrastructure

About the role

Kodiak Robotics, Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Planning team. The ideal candidate will build tools and infrastructure that accelerate Planning development, improve testing, debugging, metrics, and evaluation workflows, and expose actionable insights from logs, simulation, and real-world autonomy data.

Responsibilities

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

Requirements

• Strong software engineering background with 5+ years experience with C++ performance optimization and large-scale software systems, ideally with autonomy or robotics 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 interest to build tools that make other engineers more effective.

Plus Experience

• Experience building safety-case tooling or test coverage infrastructure.
• Experience with large-scale autonomy metrics and evaluation systems.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background with 5+ years experience with C++ performance optimization and large-scale software systems, ideally with autonomy or robotics 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 interest to build tools that make other engineers more effective.

Skills

• Strong software engineering background with 5+ years experience with C++ performance optimization and large-scale software systems, ideally with autonomy or robotics 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 interest to build tools that make other engineers more effective.

Benefits

• Competitive benefits package.

Pay

California Pay Range: $180,000 USD - $215,000 USD