Senior Software Engineer - Localization (Visual Odometry)

About the role

We are looking for a Senior or Staff Software Engineer with a strong background in Visual Odometry (VO) and Localization to join our autonomy team. This role is critical to building precise, real-time vehicle localization systems using camera-based perception for autonomous driving applications. The ideal candidate has hands-on experience deploying VO systems in real-world environments, particularly in the autonomous vehicle (AV) domain, and brings solid C++ engineering skills to architect robust, high-performance software solutions.

This role is onsite 5 days per week at our Santa Clara, CA office.

What you'll do

• Design and develop real-time Visual Odometry pipelines using monocular, stereo, or RGB-D camera inputs.
• Implement robust camera-based localization algorithms, including visual-inertial odometry (VIO), feature tracking, motion estimation, and scale recovery.
• Integrate VO systems with IMU, GPS, and other sensor data to enhance pose estimation accuracy and stability.
• Collaborate with the mapping, perception, and control teams to integrate localization with the AV software stack.
• Develop and optimize production-quality code in modern C++ for real-time performance on embedded compute platforms.
• Analyze system performance in diverse environmental conditions and drive improvements for reliability, accuracy, and robustness.
• Participate in code reviews, mentor team members, and contribute to architectural decisions.
• Stay up to date with the latest research in SLAM, VIO, and VO, and help transition promising techniques into production

What we're looking for

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of experience in robotics, computer vision, or autonomy; 3+ years specifically in Visual Odometry or VIO.
• Experience working on Autonomous Vehicle platforms (e.g., development, testing, or deployment of AV systems).
• Expert proficiency in C++ (C++14/17/20) and modern software engineering best practices.
• Solid understanding of epipolar geometry, camera calibration, bundle adjustment, and optimization techniques.
• Hands-on experience with open-source VO/SLAM libraries such as ORB-SLAM, VINS-Fusion, OpenVINS, or similar.
• Experience working with ROS/ROS2, Linux development environments, and version control systems.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience integrating visual odometry with Lidar, GPS, or map-based localization.
• Knowledge of GPU acceleration techniques (CUDA/OpenCV/OpenGL) for computer vision pipelines.
• Familiarity with real-world deployment constraints such as environmental variability, sensor degradation, and compute limitations.
• Experience in sensor calibration, time synchronization, and data preprocessing pipelines.
• Contributions to relevant open-source projects or publications in VO, VIO, or SLAM.

Salary Range - $170,000- $260,000

More about Gatik

Founded in 2017 by experts in autonomous vehicle technology, Gatik has rapidly expanded its presence to Mountain View, Dallas-Fort Worth, Arkansas, and Toronto. As the first and only company to achieve fully driverless middle-mile commercial deliveries, Gatik holds a unique and defensible position in the AV industry, with a clear trajectory toward sustainable growth and profitability.

We have delivered complete, proprietary AV technology - an integration of software and hardware - to enable earlier successes for our clients in constrained Level 4 autonomy. By choosing the middle mile - with defined point-to-point delivery, we have simplified some of the more complex AV challenges, enabling us to achieve full autonomy ahead of competitors.

Given extensive knowledge of Gatik's well-defined, fixed route ODDs and hybrid architecture, we are able to hyper-optimize our models with exponentially less data, establish gate-keeping mechanisms to maintain explainability, and ensure continued safety of the system for unmanned operations.

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

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