Senior Autonomy Safety Engineer

Kodiak; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 245,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity & bonuses

Medical, Dental, Vision

Legal services

Insurance options

Flexible PTO & holidays

Mountain View office

Dog-friendly office

EV charging

Job summary

Kodiak Robotics, Inc. is seeking a Senior Autonomy Safety Engineer to advance safety claims for autonomous perception, motion planning, and control across freight and defense logistics.

You will join a small, high‑impact Safety team focusing on probabilistic risk, simulation, and robust risk assessment. Bring an MS/PhD in a quantitative field and strong experience with Python, C++, statistical modeling, and communicating complex risk tradeoffs to engineers and executives.

Qualifications

• M.S. or Ph.D. in engineering, mathematics, statistics.
• Deep applied probability and statistics, including heavy-tailed distributions.
• Experience with Bayesian risk modeling and uncertainty quantification.
• Production Python and modern C++ code development.
• Ability to explain risk tradeoffs to engineers and executives.

Responsibilities

• Identify failure modes and edge cases; write C++ to explore high‑dimensional spaces at scale.
• Build probabilistic risk models using Bayesian methods to inform priorities.
• Support safety‑informed design decisions affecting safety and performance.
• Run simulations, structured track testing, on‑road testing, and hardware‑in‑the‑loop setups.
• Develop new safety methods when current approaches fall short.

Skills

C++ (C++17/20)

Python (numpy/scipy/pandas)

Probabilistic risk modeling

Bayesian methods

Statistical modeling

Numerical methods

Communication skills

Education

M.S. or Ph.D. in engineering, mathematics, statistics

Tools

AWS

Terraform

Elasticsearch

Job description

Kodiak Robotics, Inc. is seeking a Senior Autonomy Safety Engineer to advance safety claims for autonomous perception, motion planning, and control across freight and defense logistics.

You will join a small, high‑impact Safety team focusing on probabilistic risk, simulation, and robust risk assessment. Bring an MS/PhD in a quantitative field and strong experience with Python, C++, statistical modeling, and communicating complex risk tradeoffs to engineers and executives.