Senior Software Engineer, Motion Planning
Senior/staff engineer on Gatik's planning team building motion planning and decision-making systems for its Level 4 autonomous middle-mile trucks — designing lattice, sampling, and optimization-based planners in C++ and maturing them through simulation and on-road production deployment. Onsite 5 days/week in Santa Clara, CA.
- Compensation
- $180K–$260K / yr
- Location
- Santa Clara, CA
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 3+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Ph.D. with 3+ years or Master's with 5+ years of experience in robotics, motion planning, or autonomous systems
- Deep expertise in at least two of: lattice-based planning, trajectory optimization, model predictive control, or search-based planning
- Strong proficiency in C++ with production-quality code for real-time or safety-critical systems
- Solid understanding of vehicle dynamics, control interfaces, and motion feasibility constraints
- Experience with simulation tools and debugging motion planner behavior in realistic driving environments
- Excellent analytical and system-level debugging skills; strong communication and cross-functional collaboration
Nice to have
- Knowledge of diffusion models and/or Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models
Full description
Who we are
Gatik, the leader in autonomous middle-mile logistics, is revolutionizing the B2B supply chain with its autonomous transportation-as-a-service (ATaaS) solution and prioritizing safe, consistent deliveries while streamlining freight movement by reducing congestion. The company focuses on short-haul, B2B logistics for Fortune 500 retailers and in 2021 launched the world’s first fully driverless commercial transportation service with Walmart. Gatik's Class 3-7 autonomous trucks are commercially deployed across major markets, including Texas, Arkansas, and Ontario, Canada, driving innovation in freight transportation.
The company's proprietary Level 4 autonomous technology, Gatik Carrier™, is custom-built to transport freight safely and efficiently between pick-up and drop-off locations on the middle mile. With robust capabilities in both highway and urban environments, Gatik Carrier™ serves as an all-encompassing solution that integrates advanced software and hardware powering the fleet, facilitating effortless integration into customers' logistics operations.
About the role
We are seeking senior or staff software engineers to join our planning team to build motion planning and decision-making systems and help mature new products all the way through to production. Our planning team calculates safe paths for the autonomous vehicle to follow using mapping data, localization data, waypoints, and predicted actors around the vehicle. Your contribution will improve planning for emergency situations and planning for complicated maneuvers such as loading dock access and variable lane changes.
This role is onsite 5 days a week at our Santa Clara, CA office!
What you'll do
- Design, implement, and optimize the motion planning stack for autonomous vehicles, enabling safe, comfortable, and efficient driving in diverse real-world environments.
- Develop lattice-based planners, sampling-based planners, and optimization-based methods for generating dynamically feasible, collision-free trajectories.
- Integrate constraints from perception, prediction, and control to generate context-aware motion plans under uncertainty.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with behavior planning, control, and mapping teams to ensure robust and consistent planning behavior.
- Optimize and maintain C++-based infrastructure for trajectory generation, evaluation, and deployment in real-time onboard systems.
- Analyze closed-loop simulation and on-road performance; identify and resolve failure cases involving traffic interactions, occlusions, or dynamic obstacles.
What we're looking for
- Ph.D. with 3+ years or Master’s with 5+ years of experience in robotics, motion planning, or autonomous systems.