Title and Location: Sr Machine Learning Engineer in Santa Clara, CA.
Job Responsibilities
- Implement deep-learning models and frameworks for scene segmentation, depth estimation, active learning, and the development of situational awareness for autonomous vehicles operating in construction and agriculture environments.
- Build and evaluate machine-learning models using data from multiple sensor modalities, including vision, radar, and thermal cameras, and assess trade-offs in accuracy, robustness, and latency.
- Research and develop new methods to improve detection performance and increase processing speed.
- Collaborate with robotics engineers to transition algorithms from desktop and server-class systems to real-time field-deployed robotic platforms.
- Work with systems and software engineers to design and maintain data-processing and annotation pipelines that support continuous system monitoring, evaluation, and improvement.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field plus 1 year and 6 months of related experience.
- Required skills:
- Train and optimize computer vision models for object detection, semantic segmentation, and monocular/stereo depth estimation using supervised and self-supervised learning, including loss function customization and multi-scale model training (1 yr, 6 mos).
- Build and evaluate deep learning models using PyTorch and TensorFlow, implementing transfer learning, custom training loops, distributed training, gradient-based optimization, and hyperparameter tuning for large-scale image datasets (1 yr, 6 mos).
- Evaluate model inference performance and runtime behavior across heterogeneous hardware platforms, including high-performance computing (HPC) GPU environments, local NVIDIA GPU development systems, and VPU-based inference on production deployment machines, to ensure real-time execution requirements are met (1 yr, 6 mos).
- Design and implement end-to-end ML pipelines for data ingestion, preprocessing, model training, validation, experiment tracking, and deployment using reproducible workflows and version-controlled environments (1 yr, 6 mos).
- Integrate and validate synthetic image datasets for computer vision model training, including domain alignment, data normalization, camera parameter adjustment, and evaluation of generalization performance against real-world datasets (1 yr, 6 mos).
- Research and implement emerging computer vision architectures and training strategies, including transformer-based backbones, advanced loss functions, and optimization techniques, to improve model accuracy and inference efficiency (1 yr, 6 mos).
- Perform dataset curation, large-scale image preprocessing, exploratory error analysis, and implement active learning strategies based on model uncertainty and diversity sampling to improve training data quality and reduce false positives (1 yr, 6 mos).
- 5% domestic travel required to visit testing facilities and customer sites. May work remotely; periodic time in office required; must live within commuting distance of office.
The US annual base salary range for this position is $149,365 - $275,000, along with eligibility for Blue River’s bonus and benefit programs.
#LI-DNI
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field
- 1 year and 6 months of related experience
- Train and optimize computer vision models for object detection, semantic segmentation, and monocular or stereo depth estimation using supervised and self-supervised learning
- Experience with customized loss functions and multi-scale model training
- Build and evaluate deep-learning models using PyTorch and TensorFlow
- Implement transfer learning, custom training loops, distributed training, gradient-based optimization, and hyperparameter tuning for large-scale image datasets
- Evaluate inference performance across HPC GPU environments, NVIDIA GPU development systems, and VPU-based production systems
- Design and implement end-to-end machine-learning pipelines for ingestion, preprocessing, training, validation, experiment tracking, and deployment
- Use reproducible workflows and version-controlled environments
- Integrate and validate synthetic image datasets, including domain alignment, normalization, camera parameter adjustment, and real-world generalization evaluation
- Research and implement computer-vision architectures and training strategies, including transformer backbones, advanced loss functions, and optimization techniques
- Perform dataset curation, large-scale image preprocessing, exploratory error analysis, and active-learning implementation
- 5% domestic travel to testing facilities and customer sites
- Live within commuting distance of the Santa Clara, California office and work there periodically
What We Do
We’re Blue River, a team of innovators driven to radically change agriculture by creating intelligent machinery. We empower our customers – farmers - to implement more sustainable solutions: optimize chemical usage, reimagining routine processes, and improving farming yields year after year. We believe that focusing on the small stuff – pixel-by-pixel and plant-by-plant - leads to big gains. By partnering with John Deere, we are innovating computer vision, machine learning, robotics and product management to solve monumental challenges for our customers. Our people are at the heart of what we do. Through cross-discipline collaboration, this mission-driven and daring team is eager to define the new frontier of agricultural robotics. We are always asking hard questions, rapidly iterating, and getting our boots in the field to figure it out. We won’t give up until we’ve made a tangible and positive impact on agriculture.







