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Senior Software Engineer, Motion Planning

Santa Clara, CA

Who We Are

Gatik is in the business of autonomous freight, and that business is already on the road.

Every day, Gatik’s autonomous trucks move freight for Fortune 50 retailers, grocers and consumer brands across Texas, Arizona, Arkansas and Canada, connecting distribution centers and stores and keeping goods moving. At the heart of it all is the Gatik Driver™, our proprietary Level 4 autonomous driving system, powered by scalable, interpretable AI and engineered to deliver safe, reliable, high-frequency freight operations.

Gatik’s momentum is real. With more than $600 million in contracted revenue and $200 million raised in our August 2026 Series D round, Gatik has taken one of the toughest challenges in autonomous technology and turned it into a proven commercial business.

And the market is paying attention. In 2026, Gatik earned a place on Forbes' America's Best Startup Employers list, and the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies. The Gatik Driver™ won an Edison Award for Advancements in Autonomous Driving, and Inc. named our Co-founder and Chief Engineer, Apeksha Kumavat, to its Female Founders 500 list.

There's a lot more road ahead, and some of the brightest, most driven minds in autonomous technology are building the next chapter at Gatik. We're taking on hard engineering problems, pushing the limits of what's possible and building on a commercial foundation that's already proven itself in the real world with some of the biggest companies in the world, like PepsiCo and Loblaw. If you're ambitious, love solving problems that matter and want to see your work make a real difference, you'll find plenty to get excited about here.

About the role

We are seeking senior or staff software engineers to join our planning team to build motion planning and decision-making systems and help mature new products all the way through to production.  Our planning team calculates safe paths for the autonomous vehicle to follow using mapping data, localization data, waypoints, and predicted actors around the vehicle. Your contribution will improve planning for emergency situations and planning for complicated maneuvers such as loading dock access and variable lane changes. 

This role is onsite 5 days a week at our Santa Clara, CA office!

What you'll do

  • Design, implement, and optimize the motion planning stack for autonomous vehicles, enabling safe, comfortable, and efficient driving in diverse real-world environments.
  • Develop lattice-based planners, sampling-based planners, and optimization-based methods for generating dynamically feasible, collision-free trajectories.
  • Integrate constraints from perception, prediction, and control to generate context-aware motion plans under uncertainty.
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with behavior planning, control, and mapping teams to ensure robust and consistent planning behavior.
  • Optimize and maintain C++-based infrastructure for trajectory generation, evaluation, and deployment in real-time onboard systems.
  • Analyze closed-loop simulation and on-road performance; identify and resolve failure cases involving traffic interactions, occlusions, or dynamic obstacles.

What we're looking for

  • Ph.D. with 3+ years 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.
  • Knowledge of diffusion models and/or Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is a strong plus.
  • Excellent analytical and system-level debugging skills; strong communication and cross-functional collaboration capabilities.

Salary Range - $180,000- $260,000

More about Gatik

Founded in 2017, Gatik has grown into a commercial force in autonomous freight, operating trucks daily in live customer networks across the United States and Canada. We're headquartered in Santa Clara, California, but our impact is felt on the roads and in the supply chains that keep essential goods moving for some of the biggest companies in North America.

Our trucks do some of the most demanding work in freight, running high-frequency, time-sensitive routes between distribution centers and stores, where reliability matters every single day. For our customers, that means more capacity, better service and products arriving where they need to be, when they need to be there.

Behind it all is AI-first technology built from the ground up for autonomous trucking, capable of navigating highways and surface streets and tackling the complexity of real-world logistics at scale.

Visit Gatik for more company information and Careers at Gatik for more open roles.

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Taking care of our team

At Gatik, we connect people of extraordinary talent and experience to an opportunity to create a more resilient supply chain and contribute to our environment’s sustainability. We are diverse in our backgrounds and perspectives yet united by a bold vision and shared commitment to our values. Our culture emphasizes the importance of collaboration, respect and agility.

We at Gatik strive to create a diverse and inclusive environment where everyone feels they have opportunities to succeed and grow because we know that together we can do great things. We are committed to an inclusive and diverse team. We do not discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status or any legally protected status.

E-Verify Notice: By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Gatik participates in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security E-Verify program.

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