Construction is facing a structural labor shortage that isn’t going away. An aging workforce, declining trade enrollment, and growing infrastructure demand mean the industry needs autonomy, not as a novelty, but as a necessity. The market opportunity is massive, and the technology gap is real.
We’re building machines that navigate, perceive, and operate in unstructured heavy-construction environments - dirt, dust, steep grades, and dynamic site conditions that challenge the assumptions baked into most autonomy stacks. The technical problems are real and unsolved: robust perception across sensor modalities in environments that degrade each one, planning and controls for heavy equipment with dynamics unlike those of a passenger car, and safeguarding systems where the consequences of getting it wrong are severe. Construction autonomy also has structural advantages over public-road self-driving. Sites are partially or fully closed, the set of actors is known and constrained, and there is real opportunity to define and enforce operational design domain restrictions. This means a shorter path from a capable prototype to a deployed product - the kind of environment where strong engineering decisions translate into shipped systems, not endless corner-case tails.
We are seeking a Principal Robotics Engineer to serve as a senior technical authority on the robotics stack for Blue River’s autonomous construction program. That means owning the architecture across localization, planning, controls, and safeguarding, and being accountable for the technical bets that determine whether the system works in the field, not just in simulation. You will also work across Blue River’s autonomy programs to identify the right shared approaches, improve code reuse, and increase engineering velocity company-wide. We have multiple programs building autonomous systems for different Deere markets, and there is significant opportunity to get the technical foundations right once rather than re-solving the same problems in parallel. This role carries a mandate to make that happen, not as a side project, but as a core part of the job.
Foundational architecture decisions are being made now, and the person in this role will shape them. This is not a position where you inherit a mature system and optimize at the margins; it’s one where your judgment about what to build, how to structure it, and where to invest defines what the program becomes.