Technical Lead, Multimodal Transformers

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's autonomy stack is built on AI that fuses diverse sensor streams into a unified, actionable understanding of the world. We are developing GigaFusionNet, a large-scale multimodal transformer that learns rich, joint representations across camera, LiDAR, and radar through attention-based fusion. We are looking for a technical leader to own the architecture direction of this effort and grow the engineers building it.

This is a senior individual contributor role with significant scope. You will set technical direction for multimodal fusion at Kodiak, lead the workstream executing against it, and be accountable for the results landing on trucks.

In this role, you will:

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

What you’ll bring:

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

What we offer:

Competitive compensation package including equity and annual bonuses

Excellent Medical, Dental, and Vision plans through Kaiser Permanente, Cigna, and  MetLife (including a medical plan with infertility benefits)

MetLife Legal Services, Identity & Fraud Protection, Hospital Indemnity Insurance, Accident Insurance, & Critical Illness Insurance

Flexible PTO, 10 paid holidays, and generous parental leave policies

Our office is centrally located in Mountain View, CA

Office perks: dog-friendly, free catered lunch, a fully stocked kitchen, and 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, FSA, Dependent Care FSA, HSA

Various incentive programs (referral bonuses, patent bonuses, et …