Machine Vision Applications Engineer, San Francisco

• Volume and variety: A growing stream of customer samples across automotive, aerospace, and consumer manufacturing means you see more imaging problems in a year here than most engineers see in five.
• Your findings travel: What you learn in the lab shapes hardware decisions, deployment approaches, and what we tell customers is possible.
• Room to grow into it: This is a mid-level role with a clear path to becoming the technical voice on imaging as the lab and the team scale.

WHAT YOU’LL OWN

• Imaging feasibility: Run trials on incoming customer samples to determine whether and how an inspection can be imaged reliably.
• Lighting and optics selection: Choose and configure lighting, lenses, cameras, filters, and geometry for each application, including the parts that fight back.
• Lab ownership: Set up and run the SF lab: test standards, hardware inventory, sample handling, and how results get recorded.
• Proof-of-concept testing: Build and document POCs that give Sales and Applications a defensible answer on what the system can and cannot do.
• Image quality troubleshooting: Diagnose and resolve image quality problems that drive false rejects, missed defects, and inconsistent results.
• Hardware evaluation: Test new cameras, lenses, and lighting and recommend what belongs in our stack.
• Findings and documentation: Write up what worked, what did not, and why, so the next engineer facing the same part does not start over.

• Hands-on experience selecting and configuring lighting, lenses, and cameras to image parts for inspection or measurement.
• Experience running imaging trials, feasibility studies, or proof-of-concept testing on customer or production samples in a lab or demo environment.
• Working knowledge of optical trade-offs: lens selection, field of view, working distance, depth of field, and resolution.
• Comfortable working directly with hardware, running your own experiments, and solving problems independently.
• Able to document findings clearly and explain technical trade-offs to customers and internal teams.
• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area or willing to relocate, and able to work primarily from our SF office.

Strong Preferences

• Experience imaging difficult parts: reflective, specular, transparent, dark, or low-contrast surfaces.
• Experience with advanced lighting techniques: dome, dark field, backlight, coaxial, polarized, or structured lighting.
• Experience with telecentric optics and precision measurement.
• Customer-facing technical work: demos, application support, or on-site troubleshooting.
• Experience troubleshooting inspection performance in production: false rejects, missed defects, image quality variation.
• Familiarity with traditional machine vision software tools (Cognex, Keyence, Matrox, Halcon, Dalsa).

• Extreme growth and real-world impact: We’re not building demos. We’re deploying AI systems on real production lines, at scale.
• Talent density: You’ll work with world-class engineers and operators across AI, embedded systems, and enterprise deployment.
• Front-row seat to the AI manufacturing wave: One of the biggest transformations happening in industry right now.
• Ownership: Your work directly changes the trajectory of the company.
• Global exposure: You’ll work with the most advanced customers and factories in the world.