Autonomous Field Test Engineer

Blue River Technology•Iowa, USA, IA

3h•$91,000 - $137,000•Onsite

About The Position

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. Blue River Technology aligns with John Deere’s vision to “innovate on behalf of humanity” by quickly identifying and solving high-value, high-uncertainty challenges in AI, machine learning, computer vision, and robotics. BRT acts as a research and development flywheel, building not only new products but also new platforms that reliably create value for both Deere and its customers. From fully autonomous machines to highly precise farming equipment, BRT and Deere are partnering to create technical breakthroughs in industries like agriculture and construction. Our Vehicle Autonomy Team is looking for a highly skilled Software Field Test Engineer to deliver the promise of autonomy to the world’s farm fields. As a Test Engineer, you will be responsible for delivering trust in our autonomous solutions. We are looking for someone who thrives solving unconstrained problems, enjoys probing systems for vulnerabilities, and has a history of breaking things with the intent to make them better. In this role, you will be responsible for defining, developing, and performing feature-level testing on machinery and test setups. The schedule is ambitious and the agricultural season waits for no one. We tackle our objectives with multi-functional engineering teams consisting of systems and embedded software, test and QA, mechatronics, computer vision, and machine learning engineers. Our team is empowered to figure out how to overcome challenges and plan and prioritize work; everyone is a key contributor.

Requirements

2+ years of experience testing high-tech vehicles, robotics, or agricultural products.
Familiarity with maintenance, repair, and reprogramming of heavy equipment.
Experience within agriculture operations, operating various types of machinery.
Experience translating system and customer needs into testable requirements.
Solid understanding of software complexity and system architecture interaction.
Advanced experience with complex systems development; hardware- and software-focused understanding of meeting high-level systems needs.
Capable of creating the documentation for system validation; experienced in complex systems support.
Scrappiness and perseverance; demonstrated ability to be successful in uncertain situations, and high degree of agility and creativity to adapt and react to learnings.

Nice To Haves

Linux familiarity, including script programming, CANbus networking and Ethernet networking.
Excellent brainstorming, creative thinking and communication skills.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Ability to operate, plan, and execute within the presence of uncertainty.
Experience debugging electro-mechanical and/or perception systems.
Comfortable working independently and within teams, in parallel, and asynchronously across team boundaries, with developers and field engineering across products, features and components, in parallel.
Maintain good rapport with customers and vendors.
BS or higher in Engineering or related field.
Design of agricultural equipment.
Experience with documentation and tracking tools such as Jira, Confluence, Google Docs.
Experience with code source, build management, and deployment systems (Github/Gerrit, Jenkins, Artifactory).
Skills in Python or other language.

Responsibilities

Serve as the lead for reproducing field issues, debugging, documenting, prototyping, and system testing of new technologies that will be revolutionary in robotic and computer vision-based systems for agriculture.
Build detailed test plans; compile and analyze test results. Formulate conclusions and make recommendations.
Work closely with all Blue River and John Deere engineering teams to establish holistic tests and drive feature improvements.
Plan and guide the integration of complex multidisciplinary robotic systems, collaborating with multiple groups of engineers across Blue River and John Deere.
Evaluate product failures using advanced engineering techniques.
Integrate and/or install software at a system and subsystem (component) level.
Perform exploratory testing to understand potential test plan gaps.