{"id":69416,"url":"https://alion.io/job/kodiak-senior-software-engineer-planning-infrastructure","title":"Senior Software Engineer, Planning Infrastructure","company":{"id":29704,"name":"Kodiak","domain":"kodiak.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/kodiak","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":89,"open_postings":61,"ghost_share":0.098,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":76,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Mountain View, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":180000,"max":215000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":215000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Motion Planning","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-24T23:48:38Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-07-02","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T10:06:06Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":115,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":115},"description":"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.\nWe are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to build infrastructure, tools, and systems that support our Planning team to develop, debug, evaluate, and deploy autonomy software faster and more safely.\nYou are part of the Planning team with a focus on understanding workflows and creating infrastructure that improves engineering velocity, software quality, system performance, and test coverage. You will develop the internal tools, libraries, workflows, metrics, and evaluation systems that support behavior and motion planning development. \nThis is a great role for a strong generalist engineer who enjoys building systems that other engineers work with on a daily basis. This role is especially well-suited for someone who enjoys multiplying the effectiveness of other engineers and wants broad technical impact.\nWhat You’ll Do\nBuild tools and infrastructure that accelerate Planning development.\nImprove testing, debugging, metrics, and evaluation workflows.\nExpose actionable insights from logs, simulation, and real-world autonomy data.\nBuild infrastructure that supports safety case development and test coverage analysis.\nImprove internal libraries, developer workflows, and Planning observability.\nOptimize performance, maintainability, and reliability of Planning software.\nPartner closely with Planning engineers to identify bottlenecks and improve development velocity.\nDesign reusable systems and abstractions used across the Planning team.\nLead infrastructure projects with broad team-wide impact.\nWhat We’re Looking For\nStrong software engineering background with 5+ years experience with C++ performance optimization and large-scale software systems, ideally with autonomy or robotics systems.\nExperience building tools, libraries, frameworks, infrastructure, or developer workflows.\nAbility to write clean, maintainable, high-performance code.\nExperience with metrics, logs, testing, debugging tools, simulation, or data-driven evaluation.\nStrong systems thinking and ability to understand complex engineering workflows.\nInterest in autonomy, robotics, or planning systems.\nStrong collaboration skills and interest to build tools that make other engineers more effective.\nStrong Plus\nExperience building safety-case tooling or test coverage infrastructure.\nExperience with large-scale autonomy metrics and evaluation systems.\nThe pay range listed below reflects the base salary in our SF/Silicon Valley location, across several internal levels. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors including: work location, experience, relevant training, education, skill level and performance during interview. Total compensation at Kodiak includes base pay, equity, bonus and a competitive benefits package\nCalifornia Pay Range\n$180,000—$215,000 USD\nAt Kodiak, we strive to build a diverse community working towards our common company goals in a safe and collaborative environment where harassment of any kind is strictly prohibited. Kodiak is committed to equal opportunity employment regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or veteran status, or any other basis protected by applicable law.\nIn alignment with its business operations, Kodiak adheres to all relevant statutes, regulations, and administrative prerequisites. Accordingly, roles that carry more sensitive requirements may be limited to candidates that can satisfy additional scrutiny and eligibility for such positions may hinge on verification of a candidate’s residence, U.S. person status, and/or citizenship status. Should the position require, and Kodiak determines that a candidate’s residence, U.S. person status, and/or citizenship status necessitate an export license, bar the candidate from the position, or otherwise fall under national security-related restrictions, Kodiak will consider the candidate for alternative positions unaffected by such restrictions, under terms and conditions set forth at Kodiak’s sole discretion, or, as an alternative, opt not to proceed with the candidate’s application. If applicable, Kodiak may provide visa sponsorship for eligible candidates.\nWe use a third-party AI tool (Endorsed) to assist in the initial screening of applications. As part of the evaluation process, we provide Endorsed with job requirements and candidate-submitted applications. Final hiring decisions are made by our human recruitment team, and no automated system makes the ultimate decision regarding hiring. Certain features of the platform may qualify it as an Automated Employment Decision Tool (AEDT) under applicable regulations. We began using Endorsed on January 1, 2026. You can review the independent bias audit report covering our use of Endorsed [here](https://endorsed.com/local-law-144). By submitting your application, you acknowledge that your application may be processed by AI systems as part of the screening and selection process. If you have any questions or would like to request a separate review of your application, please contact  with \"Separate Review Request\" in the email subject line.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5787,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Autonomous Driving","Logistics","Road Transport"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-06-24T23:48:38Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":23,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.639,"p_room":0.36,"age_days":114,"expected_fill_days":76,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":215000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/kodiak-senior-software-engineer-planning-infrastructure","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/kodiak-senior-software-engineer-planning-infrastructure.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T10:41:57Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":15862,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-19T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":29704},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=29704"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fkodiak-senior-software-engineer-planning-infrastructure"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fkodiak-senior-software-engineer-planning-infrastructure"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fkodiak-senior-software-engineer-planning-infrastructure"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/kodiak-senior-software-engineer-planning-infrastructure\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fkodiak-senior-software-engineer-planning-infrastructure"}]}