Orchards in the U.S. produce $35B of fruit every year, but fruit farmers are losing 30-50% of their potential crop because they lack data needed to manage crops precisely.

About Us:

Orchard Robotics is a seed-stage startup backed by top VCs like General Catalyst, Contrary, Soma Capital, Humba Ventures, and angel investors like Howard Lerman (founder of Yext).

We’re building Robots & AI that enable precision crop management. Our AI-powered camera systems count, size, and measure the growth of every fruit on the 1,000,000+ trees in an orchard. Our mission is to help farmers to produce more food for the world, much more efficiently.

Farmers are using our technology today in some of the largest orchards in the nation.

We are looking for an ML / CV Research Engineer who will utilize their extensive domain knowledge & research background to invent creative, pragmatic, and robust solutions to challenging, real-world computer vision problems. If you're looking to help make a positive impact in the world by transforming the future of agriculture, come join us. Even if you may not meet every requirement, we'd strongly encourage you apply.

About the role:

• As an early engineer, you'll receive generous equity compensation
• Full-time role at our Bellevue, WA headquarters
• Flexible working hours
• Comprehensive Health, Vision, and Dental coverage
• We move fast, and sometimes this means staying late or working weekends
• Our team is close-knit & highly driven, you’ll work directly with our CEO and entire team
• We’re deeply motivated by the impact we’re making – every line of code written or new system built means one less fruit that goes to waste, and one more person who is fed.

What you’ll do:

• Prototype, evaluate, and deploy new machine learning / computer vision models for our AI-powered camera systems to analyze millions of fruit across hundreds of different environments and conditions
• Combine state-of-the-art scientific research with relentless creativity to build inventive, adaptable, and reliable solutions to real-world computer vision challenges, such as object detection, depth estimation, optical flow, multi-object tracking w/ occlusions, etc)
• Structure and curate our very large datasets of fruit to optimize performance of our models all throughout the growing season
• Be a generalist, supporting different parts of our software if needed

What makes you a good fit:

• Bachelor's or Master's Degree with at least 2 years of industry experience OR a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, or other relevant fields.
• Proven practical experience in developing, training, optimizing, and deploying machine learning models (PyTorch, Tensorflow).
• Experience working with massive amounts of real-world training data
• Familiarity with MLops software and data engineering to ensure consistent deployment of ML models
• Solid background of software engineering (Python, C++)
• Track record of exploring and implementing state-of-the-art computer vision research from scientific literature
• Ability to learn quickly and operate in a dynamic environment
• Enthusiasm for taking on multiple roles and responsibilities as our company grows

Bonus Points:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science or relevant fields
• Experience deploying & optimizing ML models to run fast on embedded compute like NVIDIA Jetson

Above all, we value candidates who aren’t afraid to tackle real-world challenges head-on, and are ready to make a truly positive impact on the biggest industry in the world (agriculture).

Join us in helping foster a more fruitful future!