Senior​/Staff Software Engineer, Motion Planning

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.

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 Mountain View, CA office!

• Design, build, and test the algorithms for motion and behaviour planning for autonomous driving on urban roads and highways.
• Provide end-to-end ownership of the path planning and decision-making systems, ensuring that the behaviour of Gatik's vehicles is safe, smooth, and predictable to other road users.
• Build tools that prioritize and debug issues and contribute to the development of simulation architecture to enable Gatik's software stack to be trained, tested, prototyped, and validated in a virtual environment.
• Develop a thorough understanding of the constraints and challenges of path planning for Gatik's unique use case and ODD.
• Own the vehicle functions end to end, integrate the algorithms into Gatik's software stack, and mature them to production quality.
• Automate scenario generation of on-road experiences using analytical and learned techniques

• Ph.D. with 3+ years of industry experience or Master’s degree with 5+ years of relevant industry experience
• Deep expertise in search-based planning, model predictive control (MPC), optimization, and/or trajectory generation
• Proficient in C++ with hands-on experience in Python
• Proven experience in designing and implementing real-time, on-device behaviour and motion planning/control algorithms
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate cross-functionally with engineers on system integration and large-scale product deployment
• Strong background in conducting thorough code and design reviews

Founded in 2017 by experts in autonomous vehicle technology, Gatik has rapidly expanded its presence to Mountain View, Dallas‑Fort Worth, Arkansas, and Toronto. As the first and only company to achieve fully driverless middle-mile commercial deliveries, Gatik holds a unique and defensible position in the AV industry, with a clear trajectory toward sustainable growth and profitability.

We have delivered complete, proprietary AV technology — an integration of software and hardware — to enable earlier successes for our clients in constrained Level 4 autonomy. By choosing the middle mile – with defined point-to-point delivery, we have simplified some of the more complex AV challenges, enabling us to achieve full autonomy ahead of competitors. Given extensive knowledge of Gatik’s well-defined, fixed route ODDs and hybrid architecture, we are able to hyper‑optimize our models with exponentially less data, establish gate‑keeping mechanisms to maintain explainability, and ensure continued safety…