Kodiak · Mountain View, CA

Salary
$145,000–$190,000
Posted
Jul 20, 2026
Location
Mountain View, CA
Last confirmed open
Jul 22, 2026

What this job asks for AI summary

This role centers on building and maintaining the routing engine that navigates a coast-to-coast highway map for an autonomous trucking system. Day-to-day work spans implementing routing logic for driverless operation, integrating onboard and offboard driving decisions, creating tooling for route inspection, and automating map updates. It suits engineers with a solid grounding in C++, motion planning, and graph theory who want to work on a core component of a production self-driving stack.

Mid level · 2+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Full-time

Pay in the description: $145,000–$190,000

Must have (4)
C++graph theoryrobotics softwareautonomous systems
Nice to have (3)
autonomous vehiclessimulation frameworkscloud computing

We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.

How this req sits in the market our data

Roughly 9,600 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 2,000–14,400

Applicant volume Heavy — This req sits in a large pool with little in its requirements to thin it, and auto-apply tools fire at everything in the occupation. Applying early and leading with the rare skills below is what gets read.

What the occupation pays Median $217,796 (middle half $177,469–$231,052). This posting is about at that midpoint.

Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.

Why we read it this way (7)

The job title is plain 'Software Engineer' with no level modifier, but the posting notes that 'Senior and Staff engineers will mentor' this hire — implying the role itself is below Senior. The 2+ years of experience requirement and the framing of the role as a growth opportunity support a Mid-level classification despite the sophisticated domain.

The pay range ($145K–$190K) spans 'several internal levels' per the posting, so it does not map cleanly to a single seniority band.

Motion planning, graph theory, and autonomous systems are listed under the 'What you'll bring' requirements section and are treated as hard gates, even though they are domain concepts rather than named tools — they are specific enough to constitute genuine rejection criteria for this specialized role.

Autonomous vehicles, simulation frameworks, data analysis, and cloud computing appear under 'Bonus points if you have' and are therefore preferred, not required.

The posting references routing algorithms, real-time computing, and map updates as problem domains rather than named tools; no specific routing library, mapping platform, or cloud provider is named, so no additional tool-level skills were extracted.

The role is office-based in Mountain View, CA (San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara CBSA); no remote option is indicated.

Ignored 2 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): motion planning, data analysis.

Read the full posting

The employer publishes the full description on their own site — read it there ↗. Or sign in to read it here — it's free, and it also lets you track this application.

Apply

Apply on employer site ↗