Senior Software Engineer, Motion Planning

The role

Senior or staff software engineers will build motion planning and decision-making systems. You will design and optimize the motion planning stack for autonomous vehicles to enable safe and efficient driving.

What you will do

• Design, implement, and optimize the motion planning stack for autonomous vehicles.
• Develop lattice-based planners, sampling-based planners, and optimization-based methods.
• Integrate constraints from perception, prediction, and control.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with behavior planning, control, and mapping teams.
• Optimize and maintain C++-based infrastructure for real-time onboard systems.
• Analyze closed-loop simulation and on-road performance.
• Identify and resolve failure cases involving traffic interactions, occlusions, or dynamic obstacles.

Required qualifications

• Ph.D. with 3+ years of experience in robotics, motion planning, or autonomous systems or Master’s with 5+ years of experience in robotics, motion planning, or autonomous systems.
• Deep expertise in at least two of the following: lattice-based planning, trajectory optimization, model predictive control, or search-based planning.
• Strong proficiency in C++ with experience in production-quality code for real-time or safety-critical systems.
• Solid understanding of vehicle dynamics, control interfaces, and motion feasibility constraints.
• Experience with simulation tools and debugging motion planner behavior in realistic driving environments.
• Excellent analytical and system-level debugging skills.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration capabilities.

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 an autonomous transportation-as-a-service solution. The company focuses on short-haul, B2B logistics for Fortune 500 retailers.