2 months ago
Mountain View, CA, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$230k - $300k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture roadmap for multimodal transformers fusing camera, LiDAR, and radar.
- Lead multimodal transformer projects from problem framing and experiment design through implementation and production deployment.
- Drive research on cross-modal attention, token fusion strategies, efficient multi-stream tokenization, and modality alignment.
- Define pretraining strategies using self-supervised and contrastive objectives.
- Set technical standards through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural decisions for scalable training pipelines.
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers and raise research execution quality across the organization.
- Partner with perception, planning, and infrastructure leads to align model designs with latency and compute budgets.
Requirements
- PhD with 5+ years of industry experience, or MS/BS with 8+ years of experience, 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 multimodal or multi-stream systems.
- Strong command of cross-attention, token fusion, and modality alignment techniques.
- Experience mentoring engineers and developing 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.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation package including equity and annual bonuses.
- Medical, dental, and vision plans through Kaiser Permanente, Cigna, and MetLife, including infertility benefits.
- Legal services, identity and fraud protection, hospital indemnity, accident, critical illness, disability, and life insurance.
- Flexible PTO, 10 paid holidays, and generous parental leave.
- Mountain View, California office with a dog-friendly environment, catered lunch, stocked kitchen, and free EV charging.
- Wellbeing benefits including Headspace, Calm, One Medical, Gympass, Spring Health, and Rula.
- Fidelity 401(k), commuter benefits, FSA, dependent care FSA, HSA, referral bonuses, and patent bonuses.
- Base salary range of $230,000–$300,000 for the San Francisco/Silicon Valley location.
Categories
AI ResearchML Engineering
About Kodiak
Kodiak builds an AI-powered autonomous driving stack for long-haul trucking and government programs. The company hauls freight daily across the southern United States using its technology and is leveraging the same software for U.S. Department of Defense autonomy projects. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Mountain View, California, Kodiak announced in 2024 that it had delivered a driverless semi-truck to a customer.