Senior Data Quality Assurance Engineer, Data Annotation Services

Career Area:

Job Description:

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do - but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here - we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

Help Build the Future of Caterpillar

At Caterpillar, technology always has a purpose, which is to solve our customers' toughest challenges. Through Cat Technology, we are solving problems by building the intelligence layer that connects machines, data, and people to make jobsites safer, more productive, and more sustainable. By combining deep domain expertise in physical systems with software, connectivity, autonomy, and AI, we deliver solutions that work in the real world, on real jobsites, at global scale.

You'll build and deploy against one of the most unique data foundations, over 1.6 million connected assets generating real-world data daily. These data and platform capabilities are enabling the development of AI models, edge computing architectures, and software systems that scale across fleets, products, and industries. The result will be a new generation of machines that continuously learn, improve, and deliver performance at scale.

Be Part of What's Next in Autonomous Construction Sites

Construction autonomy is one of the most complex challenges in applied AI, and at Caterpillar, advancements in physical AI, simulation, sensing, and edge computing are turning things that once felt impossible, intelligent machines operating in dynamic jobsites, into reality.

Our connected ecosystem brings together massive volumes of high-quality data to create a foundation where engineers like you can build and deploy against.

If this work motivates you, we invite you to join our team. In this role, you'll work at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds. You'll help design and deliver intelligent systems that enable machines to perceive their environment, make informed decisions, and support safer, more productive operations.

Apply today to build the new era of construction autonomy at Caterpillar.

Job Summary:

We are seeking a Senior Data QA Engineer to own the quality of training data used for robotics, autonomy, computer vision, and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems, working within a scrum team.

This role combines data quality engineering, test automation, and machine learning to define, measure, and continuously improve the accuracy of annotated and captioned datasets from real-world heavy equipment and construction environments. The successful candidate will build automated validation frameworks and quality metrics and partner with annotation providers, ML engineers, and platform teams to ensure the data feeding Caterpillar's AI models is accurate, consistent, and trustworthy. This position will also evaluate outputs from automated labeling and captioning technologies such as NVIDIA Cosmos Curator and Cosmos Reason.

This is a hands-on technical role focused on turning complex data quality challenges into scalable, automated, production-grade quality assurance solutions.

What You Will Do:

• Define, document, and maintain annotation guidelines, acceptance criteria, and quality standards for perception and VLA datasets.
• Design and execute QA strategies for human, automated, and AI-assisted labeling and captioning, including sampling plans, audits, and golden-set validation.
• Build automated data validation and test frameworks that verify labeling accuracy, consistency, completeness, schema conformance, and sensor synchronization across camera and LiDAR datasets.
• Develop quality metrics, dashboards, and alerting capabilities (precision/recall, IoU, inter-annotator agreement, defect rates) to track dataset health and drive measurable quality improvements.
• Identify, categorize, and root-cause labeling defects, partnering with annotation vendors, ML engineers, and domain experts to resolve issues and improve quality.
• Build and validate quality gates within data pipelines supporting automated labeling, human review, quality validation, and dataset publication.
• Evaluate and benchmark auto-labeling and auto-captioning platforms such as NVIDIA Cosmos Curator and Cosmos Reason and help develop AI-driven QA capabilities that scale review processes.
• Integrate QA workflows with Caterpillar data systems, external annotation providers, and human-in-the-loop processes while ensuring reliability, traceability, and observability.
• Help establish and evolve quality standards for AI training data supporting computer vision, robotics, autonomy, and multimodal AI applications.

What You Will Have:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related technical field.
• Experience developing production-grade Python software for data validation, test automation, and data processing using modern software engineering practices including version control, code review, CI/CD, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience designing and implementing automated data quality checks and testing frameworks for data pipelines, APIs, and datasets using tools such as Great Expectations, pytest, or similar technologies.
• Working knowledge of machine learning evaluation methodologies and metrics, including precision, recall, F1 score, IoU, mAP, and error analysis.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities with exceptional attention to detail and the ability to communicate findings effectively across technical teams.
• 2+ years of experience working with camera and LiDAR sensor datasets for perception or machine learning applications, including data validation, ground truth generation, and data collection quality processes.
• 3+ years of experience in data annotation and quality assurance supporting autonomous systems or computer vision projects, including development of annotation guidelines and execution of quality improvement initiatives.
• Experience using annotation and dataset management platforms such as Labelbox, Supervisely, RoboFlow, or similar solutions, including QA and review workflows.
• Experience with SQL and data analysis tools such as pandas and Jupyter notebooks to profile datasets, investigate defects, and create quality reporting.

Top Candidates Will Have:

• Experience with computer vision, robotics, autonomy, Physical AI, or multimodal AI systems.
• Experience validating AI-assisted annotation workflows, auto-labeling systems, and machine learning data pipelines.
• Experience with machine learning frameworks and experiment tracking tools such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, ONNX, Weights & Biases, or MLflow.
• Experience with NVIDIA Cosmos Curator, Cosmos Reason, or similar AI automation platforms.
• Experience working with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) datasets and caption quality evaluation methodologies.
• Experience with camera, LiDAR, radar, and autonomous machine sensor data.
• Experience with cloud platforms, data observability tooling, MLOps, and data pipeline orchestration technologies.
• Experience building human-in-the-loop quality workflows, inter-annotator agreement frameworks, and large-scale quality automation systems.

Additional Details:

• This position requires the candidate to work full-time onsite at the Irving, TX office (Dallas).
• Domestic relocation assistance is available for this position.
• Visa sponsorship is available for this position.

Why Caterpillar

You'll work on some of the most challenging applications of AI in the physical world, helping ensure the data that transforms vast amounts of machine and sensor data into the intelligence powering autonomous and AI-enabled equipment is accurate, reliable, and trusted. If you're excited about raising the bar on data quality for real-world machines operating in complex environments, we'd like to hear from you.

Summary Pay Range:

Compensation and benefits offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, job level, market location, job-relatedknowledge, skills, individual performance and experience. Please note that salary is only one component of total compensation at Caterpillar.

Benefits:

Subject to plan eligibility, terms, and guidelines. This is a summary list of benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits*

• Paid time off plan (Vacation, Holidays, Volunteer, etc.)*

• 401(k) savings plans*

• Health Savings Account (HSA)*

• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs)*

• Health Lifestyle Programs*

• Employee Assistance Program*

• Voluntary Benefits and Employee Discounts*

• Career Development*

• Incentive bonus*

• Disability benefits

• Life Insurance

• Parental leave

• Adoption benefits

• Tuition Reimbursement

* These benefits also apply to part-time employees

Posting Dates:

Any offer of employment is conditioned upon the successful completion of a drug screen.

Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer, Including Veterans and Individuals with Disabilities. Qualified applicants of any age are encouraged to apply.

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