Staff Probabilistic Risk Assessment Engineer

Kodiak Robotics, Inc. was founded in 2018 and has become a leader in autonomous ground transportation committed to a safer and more efficient future for all. The company has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) powered technology stack purpose-built for commercial trucking and the public sector. The company delivers freight daily for its customers across the southern United States using its autonomous technology. In 2024, Kodiak became the first known company to publicly announce delivering a driverless semi-truck to a customer. Kodiak is also leveraging its commercial self-driving software to develop, test and deploy autonomous capabilities for the U.S. Department of Defense. How do you prove an autonomous truck is safe enough to drive itself — without a driver — millions of miles a year? That's not a rhetorical question. It's the core engineering challenge of this role, and there's no textbook answer. The target is fewer than one fatal collision per 10⁸ hours of operation. Achieving that level of safety and proving it rigorously requires building new methods, not just applying existing ones. We are hiring for a Senior Autonomy Safety Engineer to join the team. This will be used to support our safety claims about safe perception, motion planning, and control for autonomous robots deployed in both commercial freight and defense logistics environments. Kodiak's Autonomy Safety team owns that problem. We're a small, high-impact group operating at the frontier of autonomous vehicle safety, working across probabilistic risk assessment, simulation, autonomy performance, statistical modeling, and rare-event estimation. Every teammate owns a significant piece of the overall safety story. This role is one of those pieces. What You'll Do: Find the edge cases before the road does. Identify failure modes and edge cases that expose weaknesses in our system before they appear in on-road environments. Write C++ to efficiently search high-dimensional failure spaces at scale. Build probabilistic risk models. Write Python to estimate autonomy-level risk using Bayesian models inside our Probabilistic Risk Assessment framework. Your outputs will inform engineering priorities across the company. Drive safety-informed design decisions. Provide rigorous analysis to support complex autonomy system design trade-offs that affect both safety and performance. Run and analyze simulations. Support development of simulation scenarios, structured track testing, on-road testing, and hardware-in-the-loop test rigs and communicate risk-informed findings to engineering and leadership. Pioneer new safety methods. When existing approaches fall short of our safety targets, you'll develop new ones. That's not a figure of speech, it's a regular part of this job. What you’ll bring: Required: M.S. or Ph.D. in engineering, mathematics, statistics, or a related field Deep applied probability and statistics, including fluency with skewed and heavy-tailed distributions — not just the Gaussian/Poisson/binomial core Quantitative risk and reliability modeling of complex systems: decomposing system-level risk into estimable contributions, propagating uncertainty through that decomposition, and identifying which contributors dominate the result Estimating the probability of events far rarer than you can directly observe or simulate — you understand why naïve sampling fails in this regime, and you've used advanced sampling or variance-reduction techniques to get usable estimates with quantified confidence Bayesian methods for sparse-evidence problems: combining prior engineering knowledge with limited field and simulation evidence, and defending a quantitative conclusion when the event of interest has never been observed Statistical model building and validation: fitting parametric models to messy operational data, and rigorously assessing fit — with particular attention to the tails, where a good average fit can still be badly wrong Working knowledge of tail risk metrics…