Machine Vision Applications Engineer

• Be the vision expert: Serve as a technical resource for Applications, Sales, Product, and Engineering.
• Shape our technology: Your evaluations and findings will directly influence hardware decisions, application development, and deployment strategies.
• Bridge traditional and AI vision: Apply deep machine vision fundamentals to inspection problems that conventional systems struggle to solve.
• Stay hands-on: Work directly with cameras, lenses, lighting, real customer parts, and production environments., * Optics and lighting design: Select, configure, and optimize cameras, lenses, lighting, filters, and optical components for challenging inspection requirements.
• Technical ownership of the SF lab: Drive vision experimentation, testing standards, hardware evaluation, and application development.
• Inspection performance optimization: Troubleshoot image quality, environmental variability, false rejects, missed defects, and inspection consistency.
• AI vision workflows: Work with image collection, labeling, model training, and evaluation to optimize AI-based inspection performance.
• Customer application support: Partner with customers and field teams to troubleshoot vision challenges and ensure successful deployment on production lines.
• Technology evaluation: Assess emerging vision technologies and recommend improvements to our hardware and inspection capabilities.
• Technical leadership: Mentor less experienced engineers, establish best practices, and provide technical guidance across teams.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Work closely with Product and Engineering to translate application challenges into product improvements.

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in industrial machine vision, vision applications engineering, or optical inspection systems.
• Deep understanding of machine vision fundamentals, including optics, lenses, lighting, sensors, image acquisition, and camera configuration.
• Proven experience designing, building, and optimizing industrial vision systems for real manufacturing applications.
• Strong understanding of lens selection, field of view, working distance, depth of field, resolution, and optical trade-offs.
• Experience with advanced lighting techniques and solving challenging image acquisition problems.
• Demonstrated ability to independently lead vision feasibility studies and proof-of-concept projects.
• Experience troubleshooting inspection performance in production environments.
• Familiarity with traditional machine vision tools and inspection techniques.
• Working knowledge of AI-based vision, including classification, object detection, segmentation, and model evaluation.
• Strong technical communication skills, including documenting findings and explaining technical trade-offs to customers and internal teams.
• Comfortable working directly with hardware, running experiments, and solving problems independently.
• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and able to work primarily from our SF office.

Strong Preferences

• Experience with deep learning-based industrial inspection.
• Familiarity with telecentric optics, advanced lighting configurations, and precision inspection.
• Experience with high-speed production lines, challenging defect detection, or variable manufacturing environments.
• Exposure to PLCs, industrial automation, triggering, and production-line integration.
• Experience working directly with manufacturing customers.
• Experience mentoring engineers or serving as a technical subject matter expert.

• Extreme growth and real-world impact: We’re not just building demos. We’re deploying AI systems on real production lines, at scale.
• Talent density: Work alongside world-class engineers across AI, embedded systems, and enterprise deployment.
• Front-row seat to AI in manufacturing: Help shape how manufacturers adopt the next generation of inspection technology.
• Technical ownership: Your expertise will influence real engineering decisions and customer outcomes.
• Global exposure: Solve challenging applications for some of the world’s most advanced manufacturers.