Lead AI Automation Engineer

Role Overview

The role combines software engineering, machine learning, and data engineering to build automated annotation and captioning capabilities for real-world heavy equipment and construction environments.

What You Will Do

The Lead AI Automation Engineer will lead the technical execution of a scrum team focused on annotation automation and AI-driven data production, design, develop, and deploy automated labeling and captioning solutions for perception and VLA datasets.

Why It Might Be a Fit

This role is unique as most AI automation solutions are not trained to understand heavy equipment, jobsites, sensor data, or machine operations. The candidate will help develop the AI capabilities needed to label and describe Caterpillar-specific data at scale.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field.
• Experience leading technical delivery for software or AI engineering teams.
• Experience developing production-grade software solutions using Python and modern software engineering practices.
• Experience designing and implementing distributed systems, APIs, and data processing pipelines.
• Experience training, fine-tuning, or deploying machine learning models.
• 3+ years of experience generating and managing camera and LiDAR sensor datasets for perception or machine learning applications, including data collection pipeline design and ground truth generation.
• 3+ years of experience in data annotation and quality assurance for autonomous systems or computer vision projects, with demonstrated ability to define annotation guidelines, identify labeling defects, and drive measurable improvements in dataset accuracy.
• Experience using annotation and dataset management tools such as Labelbox, Supervisely, RoboFlow or similar toolchains.
• Experience using machine learning frameworks and training tools such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, ONNX, Weights & Biases, MLflow or similar frameworks.

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