Senior Perception Engineer
About The Position
AgZen is a precision agriculture company headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, focused on improving crop spraying efficiency. Its RealCoverage system measures and controls droplet coverage at the leaf level, providing growers real-time visibility into spray performance and reducing chemical and water use. As a Senior Perception Engineer, you will contribute to AgZen’s sensing and software portfolio and own and develop the perception platform that helps growers spray more efficiently. The role is part of the measurement focus group and combines agrochemical spraying, machine learning, and computer vision. The position is in-person in Somerville, Massachusetts, in the Boston area. Strong communication, flexibility, teamwork, and willingness to take on and own varied responsibilities are important.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or graduate degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related field.
- At least 5 years of experience solving computer vision or perception problems, with a foundation in deep learning and machine learning.
- Experience with real-time or edge-based inference and integrating models with hardware or embedded systems.
- Ability to design experiments, analyze results, and iterate based on field and product requirements.
- Deep experience training and validating computer vision models, such as detection, segmentation, and classification models, for robust real-world performance.
- Ability to architect end-to-end computer vision pipelines and decompose complex problems across models and stages.
- Expertise in MLOps practices and tooling, such as MLflow, Weights & Biases, or similar experiment tracking and deployment frameworks, for managing the model lifecycle from research to production at scale.
- Advanced knowledge of software engineering principles, including software design, source control, build processes, code reviews, and testing.
- Advanced scientific Python skills, including NumPy, Pandas, and scikit-learn, and hands-on experience with PyTorch and/or TensorFlow.
- Knowledge of current perception and machine learning research, demonstrated through participation in the research community, such as reading conference papers or publishing.
- Experience operating end-to-end data or ML pipelines for reliability, scale, and observability.
- Clear communication skills and ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams in a fast-moving environment.
Nice To Haves
- Master’s or PhD degree, or equivalent experience, in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field.
- Experience in agriculture or related fields such as environmental or life sciences.
- Robust SQL skills and comfort analyzing data distributions, feature health, and model behavior.
- Experience with data science using real-world physical sensor data.
- Experience creating intuitive data visualization tools that make complex data approachable for non-technical users.
- Prior experience developing machine-learning models relevant to biological or crop-protection outcomes.
- Familiarity with embedded systems and optimizing models for edge devices.
Responsibilities
- Develop computer vision models for real-time detection and decision-making in spraying systems.
- Implement deep-learning models for object segmentation, classification, optical flow, and 3D reconstruction.
- Architect and build end-to-end models, potentially combining existing networks to improve performance.
- Use techniques such as quantization to enable power-efficient model execution on edge devices.
- Develop methods to improve model accuracy and inference speed in edge deployment scenarios.
- Collaborate with software engineering to develop data processing and annotation pipelines for continuous system improvement.
- Work with hardware, firmware, and product teams to integrate vision models with system components.
- Analyze field performance, identify causes of model behavior, propose improvements, and validate updates through experimentation.
- Establish best practices for model versioning, testing, deployment, and continuous improvement.
- Communicate progress, risks, and recommendations to engineering and product leadership.
- Explore and apply advances in AI research, including CNNs, transformers, and model quantization.
Benefits
- Early-employee equity.
- 401(k) with employer matching after 6 months of employment.
- 6 weeks of PTO per calendar year.
- 12 paid holidays.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
