Sr ML Infrastructure Engineer, E2E Autonomy

Position Description

We’re Blue River, a team of innovators driven to create intelligent machinery that solves monumental problems for our customers. We empower our customers – farmers, construction crews, and foresters – to implement safer and more sustainable solutions, driving increased profitability with less reliance on scarce labor. We believe that focusing on the small stuff – pixel-by-pixel and task-by-task – leads to big gains. With our partners at John Deere, we have the ability to bring innovative computer vision, machine learning, robotics, and product management solutions to scale production, maximizing their potential impact.

Our people are at the heart of what we do. Through cross-disciplinary collaboration, this mission-driven and daring team is eager to define the new frontier of mobile robotics. We are always asking hard questions, rapidly iterating, and getting our boots in the field and on-site to figure it out. We won’t give up until we’ve made a tangible and positive impact on the planet.

 

Summary

Our mission is to bring the power of end-to-end machine learning and robotics to John Deere, revolutionizing how robotic systems are built and opening up previously inaccessible opportunities. This involves multiple fronts. We are building products with short-term value to deploy hardware and software on customer vehicles and build the necessary datasets. Additionally, we are developing end-to-end robotics applications and the accompanying playbook.

As a Senior ML Infrastructure Engineer, you will help grow and shape our E2E stack. This involves shaping the design of the E2E training and inference pipeline, both on and off vehicle, on and off prem.  You will also help with new models, features, and augmentations. This is a lean team moving quickly. You should be comfortable and excited about working with ambiguity, helping define what will move the program forward, working across traditional boundaries, and learning new things.

• Employment Type: Full-Time
• Work Location: Santa Clara, CA preferred. If remote, you will need to occasionally travel (10-15%) to work with the team and visit the field.
• Visa sponsorship is available for this position. 

Job Responsibilities

The main job responsibilities include:

• Design and own our data pipeline, from ingestion to training to search to reinforcement-learning correction data, and hopefully one day to simulation.
• Grow the scale of our training pipeline from 10’s of hours of data to 1000’s of hours of data.
• Design extensible software to work across many vehicle platforms and jobs.
• Evaluate new models and model architectures.
• Work closely with ML engineers and robotics engineers, collaborate to solve cross-disciplinary problems, and improve performance.
• Make our project and customers successful.
• Be an ambassador for our needs and help steer us towards an E2E-first organization.

Required Experience and Skills

• 4+ years of professional experience developing machine learning infrastructure, data platforms, robotics software, or related systems.
• Proven track record of delivering complex data pipelines in production environments.
• Strong background with ML pipelines and system architectures.
• Strong Python coding skills.
• Comfortable working across traditional team boundaries to deliver results.

Preferred Experience and Skills

• Experience with robotics middleware such as ROS or other robotics-focused software packages.
• Experience with large-scale agricultural, construction, or heavy machinery systems.
• Strong CUDA background or other GPU frameworks.

 

At Blue River, we’re passionate about creating an inclusive workplace that promotes and values diversity.  While we have more work to do to advance diversity and inclusion, we’re investing in our programs, including recruiting, mentorship, career development, and learning & development to ensure they support our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion goals. We support each employee in living a full life, enabling a thriving career, and accomplishing a meaningful, challenging mission while collaborating with incredible people. We are dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t align completely with the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. 

We are an equal-opportunity employer and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request an accommodation. 

The US annual base salary range for this position is $160,000 – $287,000, along with eligibility for Blue River’s bonus and benefit programs.

Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your location during the hiring process. During the recruitment process, we may identify an alternative role or level to which you are more suited. If your ideal role at Blue River differs from the advertised position, we will provide an updated pay range as soon as possible during the hiring process.