Principal ML Engineer, E2E Autonomy
Blue River Technology
| Company | Blue River Technology |
| Category | Engineering |
| Location | Santa Clara |
| Remote | On-site (inferred) |
| Employment | Not stated |
| Level | Lead |
| Salary | Not stated by the employer |
| Posted | 28 May 2026 |
| Last verified | 30 Jul 2026 |
| Source | Employer career page (greenhouse) |
Description
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. With our partners at John Deere, we have the ability to bring innovative computer vision, machine learning, robotics, and product management solutions to scale production, maximizing their potential impact.
Our people are at the heart of what we do. Through cross-disciplinary collaboration, this mission-driven and daring team is eager to define the new frontier of mobile robotics. We are always asking hard questions, rapidly iterating, and getting our boots in the field and on-site to figure it out. We won’t give up until we’ve made a tangible and positive impact on the planet.
Summary
Our mission is to bring the power of E2E machine learning and robotics to John Deere, revolutionizing how robotic systems are built. We aim to open up previously inaccessible opportunities, delivering autonomy products that customers love.
As a senior ML Engineer, you will help grow and shape our E2E stack. This involves shaping the design of the E2E training and inference pipeline, both on- and off-vehicle and on- and off-prem. You will also help with new models and features. Our E2E team is lean and moving quickly. You should be comfortable and excited about working with ambiguity, helping define what will move the program forward, working across traditional boundaries, and learning new things.
Employment Type : Full-Time
Work Location : Santa Clara, CA (expect 3 days in the office)
Visa sponsorship is available for this position.
Job Responsibilities
The main job responsibilities include:
Design and implement end-to-end policies for complex navigation and manipulation tasks with long horizons.
Enhance policy robustness to challenges, including environmental variability, machine wear, and deployment across machine forms.
Drive the full data + modeling life cycle, from data collection requirements, experimental design, evaluation frameworks, model training, and deployment. Iteratively drive performance improvements.
Develop pretraining strategies leveraging multimodal data at scale. Explore approaches to leveraging John Deere's vast store of machine logs, and bring an E2E lens to inform future logging vision.
Edge deployment: help deliver performance with constrained compute.
Design and implement systems for active learning on the edge.
Collaborate with infrastructure engineers on scalable data pipelines, including ingest, curation, and processing training artifacts.
Collaborate with infrastructure engineers on scalable distributed training pipelines.
Collaborate with reinforcement learning, robotics, and hardware engineers to integrate ML seamlessly into the full E2E autonomy stack.
Work with product management to learn from customers, including how they want to interface with the product. Translate this to ML architecture and implement.
Contribute to the design, development, and validation of perception systems for safety.
Help shape the theory of operations and build the safety testing framework.
Drive the E2E vision and act as an ambassador for an E2E-first organization.
Technical leadership and mentorship: guide the team through complex algorithmic tradeoffs, elevate our approach to empirical testing, and mentor the next wave of E2E robotics leaders.
Stay up to date with the latest research and integrate advancements into our stack.
Required Experience and Skills
5+ years of experience delivering high-performance ML products in a professional setting, with a preference for end-to-end robotics or autonomy appl