Technical Lead, Multimodal Transformers
Public autonomous-vehicle technology company providing the Kodiak Driver, an AI-powered, modular autonomy platform for driverless commercial trucking and public-sector ground applications.
Funding history
About Kodiak AI, Inc.
Kodiak AI commercializes driverless ground-autonomy technology. Its vehicle-agnostic Kodiak Driver combines AI software, modular hardware, SensorPods, remote support, and offboard services; it serves trucking, industrial, defense, and public-sector use cases.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will own the multimodal-transformer architecture roadmap and lead work from problem framing through production deployment. You will direct research on attention, token fusion, and multimodal pretraining; review designs and code; mentor engineers; and align model designs with latency and compute budgets.
Requirements
- PhD with 5+ years of industry experience, or MS/BS with 8+ years, in AI, computer science, or a related field
- Experience leading multi-engineer technical efforts from research through production
- Expertise in transformer architectures in multimodal or multi-stream settings
- Knowledge of cross-attention, token fusion, and modality-alignment techniques
- Experience mentoring engineers
- Python and PyTorch proficiency
- Experience with large-scale distributed training and mixed-precision optimization
- Ability to influence technical direction across teams
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture roadmap for multimodal transformers
- Lead work from problem framing and experiment design through implementation and production deployment
- Drive research on cross-modal attention, token fusion, and multi-stream tokenization
- Set technical standards through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural decisions
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers
- Define self-supervised and contrastive multimodal pretraining strategies
- Align model design with system-level latency and compute budgets
Benefits
- Equity
- Annual bonuses
- Medical, dental, and vision plans
- Medical plan with infertility benefits
- Legal services
- Identity and fraud protection
- Hospital indemnity insurance
- Accident insurance
- Critical illness insurance
- Flexible PTO
- 10 paid holidays
- Parental leave
- Dog-friendly office
- Free catered lunch
- Stocked kitchen
- Free EV charging
- Long-term disability insurance
- Short-term disability insurance
- Life insurance
- Headspace
- Calm
- One Medical
- Gympass
- Spring Health
- Rula
- 401(k)
- Commuter benefits
- FSA
- Dependent Care FSA
- HSA
- Referral bonuses
- Patent bonuses