{"id":2457267,"url":"https://alion.io/job/pickle-robot-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-2","title":"Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Perception","company":{"id":176523,"name":"Pickle Robot","domain":"picklerobot.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/pickle-robot","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":10,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":138,"computed_at":"2026-10-14T06:34:16Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Charlestown, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":170100,"max":227400,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":227400},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Self-Supervised Learning","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-13T14:06:03Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-13","last_verified_at":"2026-10-14T09:43:51Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":0},"description":"We're looking for a rigorous and self-directed Senior Machine Learning Engineer to own machine learning problems end-to-end on the systems that decide how our robots grasp packages. This role will focus on problem formulation, building the data engines that feed our models, training and experimentation, and the evaluation rigor that tells us whether a model is genuinely better. Our platform and robotics engineers own runtime integration and edge deployment, so you can stay focused on the modeling loop.\nWhat You'll Do\nOwn ML Problem Formulation: You will turn ambiguous picking performance goals into well-posed ML problems, deciding what the model predicts, how labels and rewards are defined, what loss to optimize, and what \"better\" actually means. This is the core of the role.\n\nBuild the Data Engine: You will own dataset strategy end-to-end, from large-scale synthetic scene generation and distributed cloud dataset jobs to scene diversity filtering and self-supervised label generation. You will identify when the data, rather than the model, is the bottleneck, and fix it.\n\nTrain and Iterate on Large Vision Models: You will fine-tune large backbones with multiple task-specific heads, run disciplined experiments, and know both which experiment to run next and when to stop.\n\nOwn Evaluation and Verification: You will define offline metrics that predict on-robot outcomes and online metrics that help you improve performance on edge cases.\n\nDrive Technical Excellence: As a senior member of the team, you will conduct rigorous code reviews, mentor engineers earlier in their careers, and contribute to the perception and grasping roadmap.\n\nHand Off Cleanly to Production: You will produce deployable models with sane latency budgets, exportable graphs, and reproducible artifacts, partnering with the engineers who own runtime integration and inference optimization rather than owning that yourself.\n\nWhat You'll Bring\n5+ Years of Experience in Machine Learning and Computer Vision, including models you personally carried from problem statement to measured outcome.\n\nA track record of framing problems. You can translate high-level product requirements into specific engineering tasks and explain technical trade-offs to non-expert stakeholders.\n\nHands-on Experience Building Datasets at Scale: generation or collection, curation, automated quality assurance, coverage and bias analysis, and active learning to systematically close edge cases.\n\nRigorous Evaluation Habits: baselines, ablations, metric design, and a clear sense of when a result is real.\n\nExpert-level Python and PyTorch skills.\n\nComfortable with cloud training infrastructure (GCP or AWS), Docker, and experiment tracking tools.\n\nProfessional experience with at least one of the following:\n\nDeveloping and training multi-task models\n\nDeveloping and training multi-modal models\n\nDeveloping and training multi-view models\n\nSelf-supervised, outcome-based, or reward-driven learning.","description_format":"text","description_chars":2961,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Logistics & Warehouse Robotics","Industrial Robotics"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-13T16:24:54Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 9","filings_12m":9,"filings_prev_12m":10,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":147500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-03T21:08:04+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":138,"reasons":["conf:1","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-14T06:34:16Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":227400,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/pickle-robot-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/pickle-robot-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-14T11:02:56Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":13123,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-15T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":176523},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=176523"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fpickle-robot-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fpickle-robot-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fpickle-robot-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/pickle-robot-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fpickle-robot-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-2"}]}