← All roles

Technical Lead, Multimodal Transformers

Kodiak AI· AI & Machine Learning
Apply on company site
Mountain View, CA$230k - $300kFull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Senior individual contributor role to own architecture direction of multimodal fusion (camera, LiDAR, radar) and grow the engineering team at Kodiak AI, delivering transformer-based multimodal representations for autonomous driving systems.

Responsibilities

  • Own the architecture roadmap for multimodal transformers that fuse camera, LiDAR, and radar into unified representations
  • Lead the project end to end: problem framing, experiment design, implementation, and production deployment
  • Drive research direction on cross-modal attention, token fusion strategies, and efficient multi-stream tokenization, and make the calls on what gets built
  • Set the technical bar through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural decisions on scalable training pipelines
  • Mentor junior and mid-level engineers, and raise the level of research execution across the org
  • Define the pretraining strategy, including self-supervised and contrastive objectives that learn transferable multimodal representations
  • Partner with perception, planning, and infrastructure leads to align model design with system-level latency and compute budgets

Qualifications

  • PhD with 5+ years of industry experience, or MS/BS with 8+ years, in AI, Computer Science, or a related field
  • Track record of leading multi-engineer technical efforts from research through production
  • Deep expertise in transformer architectures, particularly in multimodal or multi-stream settings
  • Strong command of cross-attention, token fusion, and modality alignment techniques
  • Experience mentoring engineers and growing technical talent
  • Expert proficiency in Python and PyTorch, including large-scale distributed training and mixed-precision optimization
  • Ability to influence technical direction across teams without formal authority
  • Passion for building AI that reasons over the full breadth of sensory input to operate safely in the real world

Skills

Required:Multimodal transformer architecturesCross-attentionToken fusion techniquesPretraining strategies for multimodal modelsPythonPyTorchMentoringSystems thinking / collaboration

Benefits

  • Competitive compensation package including equity and annual bonuses
  • Excellent Medical, Dental, and Vision plans through Kaiser Permanente, Cigna, and MetLife (including a medical plan with infertility benefits)
  • MetLife Legal Services, Identity & Fraud Protection, Hospital Indemnity Insurance, Accident Insurance, & Critical Illness Insurance
  • Flexible PTO, 10 paid holidays, and generous parental leave policies
  • Office located in Mountain View, CA
  • Dog-friendly office, free catered lunch, fully stocked kitchen, free EV charging
  • Long Term Disability, Short Term Disability, Life Insurance
  • Wellbeing Benefits - Headspace, Calm, One Medical, Gympass, Spring Health, Rula
  • Fidelity 401(k)
  • Commuter, FSA, Dependent Care FSA, HSA
  • Various incentive programs (referral bonuses, patent bonuses, etc.)
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Kodiak AI

Safely driving an autonomous future.

Our purpose-built autonomous solution, the Kodiak Driver, is the AV industry’s most advanced driverless technology, seamlessly integrating into any driving platform for reliable movement in any environment. Learn how we’re shaping the future of ground transportation.

autonomousdriverlessground transportationAI
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at Kodiak AI