Technical Lead, Multimodal Transformers at Kodiak
Mountain View, CA
$230,000–$300,000
Aug 10, 2026
Mountain View, CA
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This is a senior individual contributor role at an autonomous trucking company, focused on owning the architecture and technical direction of a large-scale multimodal transformer system that fuses camera, LiDAR, and radar sensor data. The position spans research through production deployment, including pretraining strategy, cross-modal attention design, and scalable training pipelines, while also mentoring engineers and coordinating across perception, planning, and infrastructure teams. It suits a deep ML researcher-engineer with a strong background in transformer architectures and multimodal learning.
Staff level · 8+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
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 260 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (data scientists). range 55–390
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $189,150 (middle half $152,859–$224,286).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 12, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (5)
The role is titled without an explicit seniority level, but the posting explicitly states 'senior individual contributor role with significant scope' and describes org-wide technical leadership (setting direction across multiple teams, mentoring engineers, partnering with perception/planning/infrastructure leads) — this maps to Staff rather than Senior on the actual-requirements band.
Experience requirement is stated as a two-track gate: PhD + 5+ years OR MS/BS + 8+ years; the overall years minimum is set to 8 (the lower bound of the more common non-PhD path). A PhD alone does not constitute a hard degree requirement since the MS/BS path is equally valid.
SOC classification is Medium confidence: the role is primarily ML research and architecture (15-2051 Data Scientists), but the emphasis on production deployment, scalable training pipelines, and shipping code to trucks gives 15-1252 Software Developers a credible claim as the runner-up.
Compensation is described only as 'competitive compensation package including equity and annual bonuses' — no figures are provided.
The office is in Mountain View, CA; the posting does not offer remote work. Mountain View falls within the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara CBSA (41940).
Read the full posting
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