Senior Data Engineer

About the role

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will own the data platform that turns raw fleet and simulation logs into training-ready, searchable, and versioned datasets. You will work closely with perception, prediction, planning, simulation, and safety teams to make data fast to find, easy to trust, and cheap to process at scale.

This role sits at the center of Gatik's data flywheel: logs from our trucks drive scenario mining, model training, closed-loop testing, and the safety evidence we need to expand driverless operations.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and operate production-grade pipelines that ingest, decode, transform, and store multi-sensor logs from Gatik's autonomous truck fleet and simulation environments.
• Build internal tools and services for data labeling, curation, indexing, and cataloging, so engineers can find the right drives, events, and scenarios in minutes.
• Partner with ML researchers, autonomy engineers, and data scientists to design schemas and APIs that power model training, evaluation, and debugging.
• Develop and maintain feature stores, metadata systems, and dataset versioning for both structured data (events, metrics, vehicle signals) and unstructured data (camera, lidar, radar).
• Integrate synthetic and simulated data with real-world logs to support hybrid training, scenario replay, and simulation workflows.
• Build scenario-mining and event-tagging pipelines that surface rare and safety-relevant situations on our routes, such as unprotected turns, dock approaches, and adverse weather.
• Optimize pipelines for cost, latency, and traceability, with full lineage from raw log to trained model and evaluation result.
• Partner with simulation, cloud platform, and safety teams to automate closed-loop testing, regression analysis, and fleet performance analytics.
• Set data quality and observability standards, and mentor other engineers through design reviews and code reviews.

What you'll bring

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years building data-intensive software systems, ideally in autonomous driving, robotics, or large-scale ML environments.
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, and working familiarity with C++.
• Hands-on experience designing ETL/ELT pipelines with modern frameworks such as Apache Spark, Flyte, Union, Ray, or Airflow.
• Strong knowledge of cloud-native architectures on AWS (S3, EC2, EKS, Glue, Athena) or Google Cloud equivalents.
• Familiarity with sensor data (camera, lidar, radar, GPS/IMU) and serialization formats such as Protobuf, ROS/ROS 2 bags, and MCAP.
• Deep understanding of data quality, observability, and lineage in high-volume systems.
• A track record of building reliable, performant infrastructure that supports both ad-hoc exploration and repeatable production workflows.

Nice to have

• Experience in AD/ADAS, autonomous trucking, or robotics, especially with perception, prediction, or planning datasets.
• Familiarity with ML orchestration platforms such as Kubeflow, SageMaker, or Vertex AI.
• Experience with temporal and spatial data, including geospatial indexing (H3, S2, PostGIS), HD maps, and multi-sensor time-series alignment.
• Exposure to synthetic data generation, simulation logging, or scenario replay pipelines.
• Experience with lakehouse and table formats such as Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, or Parquet at petabyte scale.
• Familiarity with safety-critical development practices and data traceability for safety cases or regulatory requirements.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: CI/CD, testing, code review, and service deployment best practices.
• Experience working with cross-functional, distributed teams across research and production organizations.

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.

Notable News

For the latest company news, visit the Gatik newsroom.

Recent media coverage

• TechCrunch: Self-driving truck startup Gatik raises $200M following PepsiCo deal
• Reuters: Gatik secures $200 million in funding as autonomous freight market accelerates
• Bloomberg: Driverless Trucks Can Save Lives on America's Roads
• PepsiCo website: PepsiCo and Gatik announce multi-year agreement to deploy autonomous freight in North America
• Wall Street Journal: Driverless Trucks Are Here - and They're Delivering Bags of Doritos
• CBS News: Pepsi deploys self-driving delivery trucks
• Bloomberg: Autonomous Trucking Firm Gatik Inks Contracts Worth $600 Million
• Forbes: Hundreds' Of Gatik Robot Delivery Trucks Headed For U.S. Roads
• CNBC-TV18: No more test runs: Gatik says driverless trucks are now a real, money-making business
• Forbes: Gatik And Loblaw Announce Largest Commercial Deployment Of AV Trucks