Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Perception Job San Francisco area,California USA,Software Development

Position: Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Perception)

We’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
Develop real‑time perception models for open‑world obstacle and terrain understanding
Build multi‑modal fusion that combines camera and LiDAR into a unified 3D/BEV representation, robust to occlusions, sensor degradation, and GNSS outages
Optimize models for low‑latency inference on resource‑constrained hardware, balancing accuracy and performance
Design auto‑labeling pipelines that leverage foundation models and teacher‑student distillation to scale labeling and close the loop from real‑world field interventions
Design data and evaluation pipelines that curate large multi‑sensor datasets and surface failures fast, with strong visualization and debugging tooling
Analyze performance metrics and iterate on algorithms to improve accuracy and efficiency of various perception subsystems

Benefits

Flexible Spending Account (FSA)
100% covered medical, dental, and vision for the employee (dependents is additional)
Commuter benefits
Life insurance
Short- and long-term disability
401k plan
Stock options

Requirements

An eagerness to get your hands dirty and agility in a fast-moving, collaborative, small team environment with lots of ownership
Strong grounding in multi-sensor integration (camera, LiDAR, radar): calibration, spatiotemporal sync, and cross-modal fusion
Deep expertise developing and deploying modern perception models: detection, segmentation, mono/stereo/metric depth, BEV/occupancy, sensor fusion, and 3D scene understanding
Experience handling large datasets efficiently and organizing them for labeling, training and evaluation
A MS/PhD in Computer Science, AI, or a related field, or 6+ years of industry experience building vision-based perception systems
Proven ability to design experiments, analyze metrics (mAP, IoU, latency/throughput, and calibration/ECE), and optimize to meet stringent real-world performance and safety requirements
Fluency adapting, fine-tuning, and distilling large pre-trained vision and vision-language models
Fluency in Python with PyTorch/Tensor Flow/OpenCV and the ability to write efficient, production-ready code for real-time systems
Experience architecting multi-sensor ML systems from scratch
Experience building auto-labeling / data-engine flywheels at scale
Experience with compute-constrained pipelines including optimizing models to balance the accuracy vs. performance tradeoff, leveraging TensorRT, model quantization, etc
Familiarity 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) models
Publications at top-tier perception/robotics venues (CVPR, ICRA, CoRL, RSS, etc.)
Experience with compute-constrained deployment:
TensorRT, model quantization, and custom CUDA operations
Passion for how we feed, build, move, and maintain the world

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Senior​/Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Perception

Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Perception