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 deliver technical breakthroughs across industries such as agriculture and construction.
Our people are at the heart of what we do. Through cross-disciplinary collaboration, this mission-driven team is eager to define the new frontier of robotics. We are always asking hard questions, rapidly iterating, and getting our boots in the field to figure it out. We won’t give up until we’ve made a tangible and positive impact on the planet!
Blue River Technology is based in Santa Clara, CA.
Summary
Within the See & Scout team, we turn machine vision into a production system intelligence capability. As Director of Engineering, you will be the primary architect of the systems and culture that help customers make better decisions across every acre they farm. You will lead the charge in bridging the gap between muddy boots in the field and high-performance distributed systems in the cloud.
This is a high-impact leadership position reporting directly to See & Spray's VP of Engineering. You will own the technical roadmap and the professional growth of a multidisciplinary team of data, ML, and robotics engineers. You aren't just managing people; you are building the engine that scales our ambitious long-term vision.
- Employment Type: Full-Time
- Work Location: Remote in the United States. Expect to be onsite in Santa Clara, CA, 1-2x per quarter.
- Visa sponsorship: Open to visa sponsorship.
Job Responsibilities
The main job responsibilities include:
- Lead and Grow the Organization: Recruit, mentor, develop, and retain a high-performing multidisciplinary engineering organization spanning software, data, machine learning, and robotics. Foster a culture of accountability, technical excellence, rapid iteration, and continuous learning.
- Own Technical Strategy & Architecture: Define the technical vision, architecture, and multi-year roadmap for the See & Scout platform. Lead architectural decisions across large-scale data platforms, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and machine learning capabilities.
- Build Scalable Data & ML Platforms: Design and oversee the complete data and machine learning lifecycle, including telemetry and imagery ingestion, storage, processing, feature engineering, model training, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
- Drive Platform & Product Delivery: Own the end-to-end software development lifecycle, ensuring scalable infrastructure, reliable deployments, operational excellence, and rapid delivery of customer-facing capabilities.
- Partner Across the Organization: Collaborate closely with Product Management, Agronomy, Operations, Systems Engineering, Robotics, Machine Learning, and Program Management teams to define strategy, prioritize investments, and deliver customer value.
- Scale for the Future: Build platforms capable of supporting Blue River's long-term "Individual Plant" vision by solving large-scale data management, cloud processing, edge computing, and machine learning challenges.
- Provide Technical Leadership: Lead technical strategy through architecture reviews, design discussions, and engineering decision-making while balancing long-term platform investments with short-term product delivery.
- Drive Customer Impact: Translate customer and grower needs into scalable platform capabilities that generate actionable insights from real-world agricultural data.
- Influence Across Blue River & John Deere: Build strong partnerships across organizations, align stakeholders around technical strategy, and help drive adoption of shared platform capabilities.
Required Experience and Skills
- Leadership & Organizational Experience
- 15+ years of professional experience in software engineering, data engineering, machine learning, robotics, or related technical disciplines.
- 5+ years of engineering leadership experience as a Director or equivalent senior leadership role.
- Proven success building, scaling, and leading multidisciplinary engineering organizations.
- Experience hiring, mentoring, coaching, developing, and retaining engineering leaders and technical talent.
- Experience leading organizations through rapid growth, organizational change, and ambiguity.
- Technical Experience
- Deep experience building and operating large-scale data platforms, machine learning infrastructure, or cloud-native distributed systems.
- Proven experience architecting end-to-end production data and machine learning platforms, including:
- Data ingestion
- Storage
- Processing
- Feature engineering
- Model training
- Deployment
- Monitoring
- Continuous improvement
- Strong understanding of modern cloud-native architectures and distributed systems.
- Experience delivering production machine learning systems operating under real-world constraints such as:
- Noisy data
- Edge deployment
- Limited connectivity
- Ability to lead technical strategy and actively participate in architecture reviews and technical design discussions.
- Cross-Functional Leadership
- Experience partnering with Product Management, Operations, Domain Experts, Program Management, and Engineering organizations.
- Demonstrated ability to influence executive stakeholders and align cross-functional teams.
- Strong communication, stakeholder management, and organizational leadership skills.
- Ability to balance long-term platform investments with near-term product delivery.
- Personal Attributes
- Strong systems thinker with excellent technical judgment.
- Pragmatic leader capable of balancing architectural excellence with execution velocity.
- Excellent communicator who can influence audiences across all technical levels.
- Customer-focused mindset with the ability to translate business needs into technical strategy.
- Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical discipline.
Preferred Experience and Skills
- Industry Experience
- Experience developing production systems in robotics, autonomy, computer vision, machine learning, AI, or physical-world applications.
- Experience in agriculture, autonomous vehicles, robotics, industrial automation, construction technology, geospatial systems, or other large-scale sensor-driven environments.
- Experience building products that combine cloud infrastructure, edge computing, and machine learning.
- Experience working in startup or high-growth technology environments.
- Machine Learning & Data Platforms
- Experience with MLOps, DataOps, feature engineering, model monitoring, and modern AI infrastructure.
- Experience managing large-scale telemetry, imagery, or sensor datasets.
- Experience building internal platforms used by multiple engineering teams.
- Organizational Leadership
- Experience leading managers and manager-of-managers.
- Experience defining and executing multi-year technology roadmaps.
- Demonstrated success scaling engineering organizations from early-stage initiatives to mature production platforms.
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Only individual applicants will be considered. We do not work with unsolicited third-party agencies or proxy interview services.
At Blue River, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. For this position, the reasonably expected pay range is between $213,000 – $378,000/year for the level at which this job has been scoped. Your base pay will depend on several factors, including your experience, qualifications, education, location, and skills. This position is also eligible for an annual performance bonus and a competitive benefit package. During the recruitment process, we may identify an alternative role or level to which you are more suited. If your ideal role at Blue River differs from the advertised position, we will provide an updated pay range as soon as possible during the hiring process.
We’re passionate about creating an inclusive workplace that promotes and values diversity. While we have more work to do to advance diversity and inclusion, we’re investing in our programs, including recruiting, mentorship, career development, and learning & development, to ensure they support our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion goals. We support each employee in living a full life, enabling a thriving career, and accomplishing a meaningful, challenging mission while collaborating with incredible people. We are dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t align completely with the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway.
We are an equal-opportunity employer and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request an accommodation.
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