--- title: 'Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Perception at Agtonomy' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-perception-agtonomy-south-san-francisco-67qm2g4t9xjw' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Perception at Agtonomy - **Company:** Agtonomy - **Location:** South San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $200k–$280k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-07-09 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/agtonomy/f9993d56-9fba-49c2-b0b2-a9f9e8aeaa0a ## Job description ## About Us At 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 Role 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. ## What You'll Do - 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. ## What You'll Bring - A MS/PhD in Computer Science, AI, or a related field, or 6+ years of industry experience building vision-based perception systems. - Deep expertise developing and deploying modern perception models: detection, segmentation, mono/stereo/metric depth, BEV/occupancy, sensor fusion, and 3D scene understanding. - Fluency adapting, fine-tuning, and distilling large pre-trained vision and vision-language models. - Strong grounding in multi-sensor integration (camera, LiDAR, radar): calibration, spatiotemporal sync, and cross-modal fusion. - Experience handling large datasets efficiently and organizing them for labeling, training and evaluation. - Fluency in Python with PyTorch/TensorFlow/OpenCV and the ability to write efficient, production-ready code for real-time 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. - An eagerness to get your hands dirty and agility in a fast-moving, collaborative, small team environment with lots of ownership. What Makes You a Strong Fit - 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. - Experience with compute-constrained deployment: TensorRT, model quantization, and custom CUDA operations. - Publications at top-tier perception/robotics venues (CVPR, ICRA, CoRL, RSS, etc.). - Passion for how we feed, build, move, and maintain the world. ## Benefits - 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! ## About Agtonomy ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Agtonomy is a smart automation company that embeds AI-driven software and physical intelligence into industrial equipment to help growers and operators tackle labor shortages, improve efficiency, and manage rising costs. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series A) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States (with a secondary office in South San Francisco) - **Founded**: 2021 - **Founders**: Tim Bucher (CEO & Co-Founder), Valerie Syme (Co-Founder) ## Core Business - **Primary Industries**: Automation Machinery Manufacturing, Agriculture Technology (AgTech), Robotics, AI - **Target Customers**: B2B — growers, farmers, and operators in agriculture, turf, and other off-road industrial sectors - **Mission Statement**: "To create automation that empowers, not replaces. Our solutions are designed to fit naturally into existing workflows, making it easier to get more done with fewer resources while preserving the human expertise that defines great work." ## Products & Services - **Agtonomy Platform**: A unified platform that allows farmers to monitor, automate, and manage fleets of vehicles through an app, providing insights and control over farm operations. - **TeleFarmer™**: A software platform and mobile app that enables farmers to plan, assign, and monitor field tasks remotely, providing tele-guidance for agricultural operations. - **Autonomous Solutions**: Systems designed to handle labor-intensive tasks such as mowing, spraying, and transporting in challenging terrains — available on both diesel and electric platforms. - **Smart Farm Task Ecosystem**: Connects self-driving tractors with farm tools to autonomously execute tasks, enhancing efficiency and sustainability. - **Smart Take-Off (STO)™**: A plug connector that facilitates power and data transfer between tractors and tool attachments, improving energy efficiency and safety. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed - **Total Funding**: $73M across 7 rounds, including: - Seed Round (Sep 2021): $4.0M (3 investors) - Series A (Dec 2023): $22.5M (led by Momenta Ventures, 4 investors) - Corporate Round (Jun 2023): led by Doosan Bobcat - Venture Round (Apr 2026): 1 investor - **Annual Revenue**: $17.5M (estimated) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Doosan Bobcat, Momenta Ventures, Cavallo Ventures, Allison Transmission Holdings - **Growth Signals**: - Headcount grew +32.7% YoY, reaching 59 employees - Expanding internationally in 2025 beyond the western United States - Active hiring with 5 open positions as of latest data ## Competitive Advantages - **Embedded OEM Partnerships**: Agtonomy's technology is factory-fit into equipment from brands like Doosan Bobcat, giving it a distribution moat that's hard for pure-play robotics startups to replicate. - **Physical AI Expertise**: The company uses field-proven physical AI (computer vision, sensor fusion, autonomy stacks) built for complex, real-world environments — not just controlled labs. - **Dual Platform Strategy**: Offers both diesel and electric platforms, making the technology accessible to a wider range of customers without forcing a full fleet transition. - **Operator-Centric Design**: Unlike fully autonomous-only players, Agtonomy builds for "hybrid autonomy" where operators retain command, which increases trust and adoption in conservative industries like agriculture. ## Strategic Focus - **International Expansion**: Actively expanding beyond the western United States into new global markets in 2025. - **Multi-Industry Pivot**: While rooted in agriculture, the company is growing to serve turf, construction, and other off-road industries — broadening its total addressable market. - **Talent Acquisition**: Investing heavily in technical talent (per active job postings for ML engineers, data engineers, and software engineers) to strengthen its AI and autonomy capabilities. - **Product Depth**: Building out the analytics and insights layer (Lead Data Engineer role) to provide more value from operational data. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & Mission**: Agtonomy's team describes itself as "a powerhouse of innovators, engineers, and field experts united by a bold vision." The company emphasizes practical, real-world impact rather than abstract robotics research. - **Work Policy**: **Hybrid** — employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work, with a typical expectation of 4 days per week on-site in South San Francisco. - **Perks**: - Unlimited PTO policy - Competitive salaries (e.g., Software Engineer: $129,341/yr, Firmware Engineer: $143,456/yr, Creative Director: $128,122/yr) - **Engineering Culture**: Strong technical stack (Python, TypeScript, Go, Flutter, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Terraform) and a team with deep robotics/AI experience from top companies like Kitty Hawk, Cruise, Saildrone, Outrider, and Kodiak. - **Team Composition**: 46% of employees are in technical roles; the company has a lean, high-impact structure with significant senior and director-level talent. - **Growth Trajectory**: High YoY headcount growth (+32.7%) and active hiring signal a company in expansion mode — good for career growth. ## Sources 1. [agtonomy.com](https://www.agtonomy.com/about) 2. [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/agtonomy) 3. [crunchbase.com](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/agtonomy) 4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/agtonomy) 5. [jobs.lever.co](https://jobs.lever.co/agtonomy) ## Other roles at Agtonomy - [Head of Hardware](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-hardware-agtonomy-south-san-francisco-1es1dn0efwgq) — South San Francisco, CA - [Strategic Account Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-account-manager-agtonomy-bakersfield-t3wrq0v7trpr) — Bakersfield, CA - [Technical Program Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-agtonomy-south-san-francisco-z7h9w1ksm3m5) — South San Francisco, CA - [Lead Data Engineer, Analytics & Insights](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-data-engineer-analytics-insights-agtonomy-south-san-francisco-tgpd5vcnywe2) — South San Francisco, CA