Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Perception

About UsAt Agtonomy, we’re not just building tech—we’re transforming how vital industries get work done. Our Physical AI and fleet services turn heavy machinery into intelligent, autonomous systems that tackle the toughest challenges in agriculture, turf, and beyond. Partnering with industry-leading equipment manufacturers, we’re creating a future where labor shortages, environmental strain, and inefficiencies are relics of the past. Our team is a tight-knit group of bold thinkers—engineers, innovators, and industry experts—who thrive on turning audacious ideas into reality. If you want to shape the future of industries that matter, this is your shot.About The RoleWe're looking for a skilled ML engineer to build the perception systems that give our autonomous machines human-like awareness in rugged, unstructured environments. You'll develop computer vision and machine learning systems that turns noisy camera and LiDAR data into robust 3D scene understanding — enabling heavy equipment to operate safely through dust, glare, occlusion, and whatever messy conditions a working site throws at it.The field is moving past bounding-box detection and hand-tuned tracking toward learned, dense scene representations, foundation-model-driven data engines, and uncertainty-aware perception. You'll be at the center of that shift. This role is hands-on: you'll write production-grade software, distill and optimize models for embedded hardware, and validate your work on real machines at operating around the world.What You'll DoDevelop real-time perception models for open-world obstacle and terrain understandingBuild multi-modal fusion that combines camera and LiDAR into a unified 3D/BEV representation, robust to occlusions, sensor degradation, and GNSS outagesOptimize models for low-latency inference on resource-constrained hardware, balancing accuracy and performanceDesign auto-labeling pipelines that leverage foundation models and teacher-student distillation to scale labeling and close the loop from real-world field interventionsDesign data and evaluation pipelines that curate large multi-sensor datasets and surface failures fast, with strong visualization and debugging toolingAnalyze performance metrics and iterate on algorithms to improve accuracy and efficiency of various perception subsystemsWhat You'll BringA MS/PhD in Computer Science, AI, or a related field, or 6+ years of industry experience building vision-based perception systemsDeep expertise developing and deploying modern perception models: detection, segmentation, mono/stereo/metric depth, BEV/occupancy, sensor fusion, and 3D scene understandingFluency adapting, fine-tuning, and distilling large pre-trained vision and vision-language modelsStrong grounding in multi-sensor integration (camera, LiDAR, radar): calibration, spatiotemporal sync, and cross-modal fusionExperience handling large datasets efficiently and organizing them for labeling, training and evaluationFluency in Python with PyTorch/TensorFlow/OpenCV and the ability to write efficient, production-ready code for real-time systemsProven ability to design experiments, analyze metrics (mAP, IoU, latency/throughput, and calibration/ECE), and optimize to meet stringent real-world performance and safety requirementsAn eagerness to get your hands dirty and agility in a fast-moving, collaborative, small team environment with lots of ownershipWhat Makes You a Strong FitExperience architecting multi-sensor ML systems from scratchExperience building auto-labeling / data-engine flywheels at scaleExperience with compute-constrained pipelines including optimizing models to balance the accuracy vs. performance tradeoff, leveraging TensorRT, model quantization, etcFamiliarity with emerging predictive world models for anticipation, anomaly detection, or closed-loop simulation, and adjacent policy paradigms such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) and World-Action (WAM) modelsExperience with compute-constrained deployment: TensorRT, model quantization, and custom CUDA operationsPublications at top-tier perception/robotics venues (CVPR, ICRA, CoRL, RSS, etc.)Passion for how we feed, build, move, and maintain the worldBenefits 100% covered medical, dental, and vision for the employee (partner, children, or family is additional) Commuter Benefits Flexible Spending Account (FSA or HSA) Life Insurance Short- and Long-Term Disability 401k Plan Stock Options Collaborative work environment working alongside passionate mission-driven team!The US base salary range for this full-time position is $200,000 to $280,000 + equity + benefits + unlimited PTOThe range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location, internal equity, and additional factors, including, but not limited to, job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or specialty training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range during the hiring process.