Director of Engineering, See & Scout

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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