Senior Behavior Planning Engineer

The role

This person will design, implement, and maintain the core behavior planning system for autonomous vehicles. They will develop behavior tree architectures and build C++ software infrastructure for decision-making.

What you will do

• Design, implement, and maintain the core behavior planning system for autonomous vehicles.
• Develop and extend behavior tree architectures for hierarchical decision logic.
• Collaborate with motion planning, prediction, and control teams.
• Build and optimize C++-based software infrastructure for behavior planning.
• Evaluate planner performance in real-world and simulated environments.
• Participate in design reviews and system integration.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and architectural guidance for junior team members.

Required qualifications

• Ph.D. with 3+ years or Master’s with 5+ years of industry experience in robotics, autonomous systems, or behavior planning.
• Proven experience in behavior planning, including use of behavior trees, finite state machines, or rule-based planners in autonomous driving or robotics applications.
• Strong proficiency in C++ with a deep understanding of performance, memory management, and software architecture in production systems.
• Solid understanding of motion planning and prediction interfaces, with experience building real-time, safety-critical systems.
• Strong debugging, system thinking, and collaborative communication skills.

Nice to have

• Knowledge of diffusion models and/or Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models

About the company

Gatik is a leader in autonomous middle-mile logistics providing autonomous transportation-as-a-service. The company focuses on short-haul, B2B logistics for Fortune 500 retailers using proprietary Level 4 autonomous technology.