About Kodama

Kodama Systems is a technology company transforming the forestry industry with teleoperation and supervised autonomy. With our retrofit control systems, machines can be driven from anywhere off project sites, improving safety, reducing costs, and addressing labor challenges across the $100B timber industry. Backed by leading investors and industry partners, Kodama’s solutions offer timberland owners and logging contractors scalable, cost effective tools for forest management and wildfire mitigation. For more information, visit www.kodama.ai.

Overview

We are looking for a senior or principal engineer who can translate emerging capabilities in computer vision and machine learning into reliable, observable, and maintainable vehicle systems operating under real-world constraints.

We are seeking a principal-level robotics and systems architect to provide technical leadership across embedded software, perception systems, and vehicle integration. This role is for an engineer who has repeatedly delivered complex robotic systems into the field and can operate comfortably across hardware, software, and autonomy domains.

While the role carries broad ownership and influence, it remains deeply hands-on: writing production C++ code, diagnosing system failures, and unblocking teams when reality diverges from design.

Location

Remote. Company based in California but anywhere in US.

 

Responsibilities

 

Embedded & Robotics Software Development

• Design, implement, and maintain production C++ software for NVIDIA Jetson platforms, cloud services, and peripheral devices.
• Lead sensor integration efforts including camera pipelines, synchronization, calibration, and performance validation.
• Debug complex distributed systems involving timing, bandwidth required vs reliability, and hardware faults.
• Guide performance optimization across CPU, GPU, and memory on constrained edge platforms.

 

Perception & ML Systems Enablement

• Shape how computer vision and ML models are deployed, versioned, monitored, and updated on embedded systems.
• Ensure perception systems are designed for operational realities including startup behavior, degraded modes, logging, and field diagnostics.
• Define data capture, labeling, and offload strategies that support continuous improvement without compromising system stability.
• Partner with autonomy the team to align model capabilities with platform constraints.

 

System Architecture & Technical Direction

• Own the end-to-end architecture of perception pipelines and data offload.
• Balancing near-term delivery and field reliability.

 

Reliability, Safety & Field Operations

• Set technical standards for observability, fault detection, recovery, and safe-state behavior.
• Ensure systems are testable across simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and deployed vehicles.
• Lead root-cause analysis of field incidents and drive systemic fixes rather than local patches.
• Incorporate safety-critical thinking and redundancy where appropriate without unnecessary complexity.

 

Platform, Build & Deployment Strategy

• Own the evolution of build, deployment, and provisioning systems spanning C++, Python, Rust, and firmware.
• Ensure reproducibility, traceability, and rollback capability across all deployed systems.

 

Organizational Technical Leadership

• Act as a technical authority and mentor across robotics, embedded, and autonomy teams.
• Identify architectural risks early and proactively align stakeholders on mitigation strategies.
• Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, technical documentation, and shared standards.

 

Qualifications

• • 10+ years of experience delivering complex software-driven systems, with significant time in robotics, autonomy, or embedded products.
  • Deep expertise in C++/Python and systems-level programming.
  • Familiarity with GPU-accelerated pipelines
  • Hands-on work with TensorRT, CUDA, OpenCV, or GPU-accelerated inference pipelines.
  • Proven track record deploying computer vision or ML systems on real hardware under operational constraints.
  • Strong understanding of hardware–software integration including sensors, buses, timing, and failure modes.
  • Experience designing systems that are observable, debuggable, and resilient in the field.
  • Extensive experience with embedded Linux and edge computing platforms such as NVIDIA Jetson.

 

Nice to Have

• Deep experience with ROS 2 or other robotics middleware at scale.
• Experience with safety-critical, industrial, or regulated systems.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, or similar observability tooling.
• Experience designing data pipelines that support ML iteration and fleet learning.
• Prior responsibility for multi-year platform architecture decisions.
• Experience operating robotic systems in harsh, remote, or safety-sensitive environments.

 

Benefits

• Comprehensive health (medical, dental, vision and more).
• Generous stock options. We're an early-stage company and we want you to benefit from being an early contributor.
• Flexible time off. Work hard and take time off when you need it.
• 401K savings plan

 

Note – please attach a resume in either .pdf or .doc format. Due to the volume of inquiries, not all applicants will receive a response.