Principal Platform Engineer

Blue River Technology•Santa Clara, CA

15h•Remote

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. Summary We are seeking a Principal Engineer to provide senior technical leadership for our CVML and Robotics Data Platform, with a strong focus on data enablement across the robotics development lifecycle. This role is responsible for building and evolving APIs, applications, pipelines, and visualizations that enable Machine Learning Engineers (MLEs), Data Scientists (DS), and other personas involved in robotics development to work efficiently at scale. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. The Principal Engineer will act as a technical lead and mentor for Senior and Staff Engineers, set technical direction, and drive execution on complex, cross-cutting initiatives. People management is optional and not a core requirement of the role.

Requirements

12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated impact at the Staff or Principal Engineer level.
Proven experience serving as a technical lead for senior engineers on complex, distributed systems.
Strong background in building data platforms, internal tooling, or developer platforms.
Expertise in designing and operating APIs and distributed systems at scale.
Hands-on experience with: Python, React Databricks / Spark Databases: Postgres, MongoDB Cloud: AWS Orchestration: Airflow or similar Infrastructure as Code: Terraform / Terragrunt Observability: Prometheus / Grafana.
Strong system design skills and architectural judgment.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting machine learning, computer vision, or robotics workflows.
Familiarity with ML lifecycle tooling.
Experience working with robotics or autonomous systems data.
Experience with C++, particularly in performance-critical systems or robotics-adjacent components.
Strong instincts for developer experience (DX).
Experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams.
Prior people management experience (optional).

Responsibilities

Own and drive the technical vision, architecture, and standards for data enablement within the CVML and robotics platform.
Serve as technical lead for major initiatives, guiding design, implementation, and delivery.
Mentor and coach Senior and Staff Engineers from a technical standpoint through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural guidance.
Design, build, and maintain scalable APIs and backend services exposing robotics, sensor, simulation, and ML lifecycle data.
Lead development of developer-facing applications and visualizations supporting model training, evaluation, debugging, and deployment workflows.
Architect, build, and operate data pipelines and workflows
Define and implement infrastructure-as-code with Terraform and Terragrunt.
Establish and evolve observability standards using Prometheus and Grafana.
Partner closely with MLEs, Data Scientists, Robotics Engineers, and Product to translate workflows into robust platform capabilities.
Get hands-on to unblock teams, resolve complex technical challenges, and lead response to high-priority incidents.
Clearly communicate technical decisions, tradeoffs, and architectural rationale to engineering and leadership stakeholders.
Applies a customer-first approach to platform design, ensuring solutions solve meaningful customer problems at scale.