Senior Robotics Software Engineer

About Us

We’re a team of roboticists and engineers building robots that harvest mushrooms. We’re the first company to demonstrate complete robotic harvesting of a mushroom growth bed and one of the top Ag-tech companies in North America. We have real robots deployed in the field with our customers in commercial growing operations around the world. We’re using modern robotics, A.I. and data to improve mushroom harvesting and tackle labour shortages in the industry. We’re based out of Salmon Arm, British Columbia, in the Shuswap region of BC’s Thompson-Okanagan. 

The Role

We’re looking for a Senior Robotics Software Engineer who is comfortable working with real hardware and wants to solve the perception, control, and autonomy challenges required to make our machines functional, reliable, and economical. 

As a Senior Robotics Software Engineer, you will contribute across our stack: improving detection on the bed with our depth camera systems, using our soft grippers to pick mushrooms while minimizing damage, and programming our harvest intelligence to maximize the output of our customers' crops.

Growing and harvesting Mushrooms is a complex biological process, and our systems generate mountains of data that we use to understand and improve how our machines perform. You'll work alongside and guide the teams responsible for managing that data, and use it to measure our performance and build the interfaces our customers rely on. Working with growers in Canada, Europe, and Australia and occasionally visiting our deployments at their sites, you will come to have an in-depth understanding of mushroom growing, if not a genuine appreciation for it.

The Successful Candidate

If any of the following sounds like you and if this is where you aspire to learn and to take your career, you may be a great fit for robotics engineering at 4AG. 

You've worked with hardware before, and you understand what it takes to interface with sensors and motor drives and to coordinate multiple autonomous systems. The thought of debugging multiple 50 kg machines inside an active mushroom-growing room sounds like a good time. The thought of building the remote diagnostics, tooling, and testing that keep those machines running without engineers on site sounds even better. You understand the work required to take a prototype and put it into production.

You've implemented perception and/or control features. You can stitch depth images together, use them to localize, and generate the trajectories to act on them. You've targeted and tracked something with a vision system and then grasped it with a manipulator, in simulation or in real life. You understand the role that intrinsic and extrinsic calibration plays in sensor fusion.

You've worked with modern robotics tooling: simulation, visualization, logging, and frameworks such as ROS2. You can remotely diagnose and update a system on the other side of the planet, and you know what it takes to manage a fleet of robots across multiple sites. You understand the power of modern A.I. tools, but you’re still in the driver’s seat. Most of all, you're genuinely curious about robotics and technology and how they apply to agriculture and the natural world. You're willing to chart your own course while building a product that has never been fielded before, and to dig into the finer details and the data behind mushroom harvesting.

This role requires broad expertise, grit, and a willingness to learn new things in mushroom agriculture, robotics, and business. Along with robotics engineering, our team members are charged with understanding our customers, our product, and operating our machines in the test lab and in the field.

Skills

·       C++, Python

·       Experience with real hardware and robotics

Nice-to-haves

·       Experience working with ROS2 or other robotics frameworks

·       Experience working with simulation frameworks (e.g., Isaac Sim, Gazebo, MuJoCo)

·       Experience using visualization tools for development and debugging (e.g., Foxglove, Formant, ReRun, RViz, PlotJuggler)

·       Experience with open-source libraries common in robotics (e.g., OpenCV, Eigen, Pinocchio, Ceres/GTSAM, OMPL, etc.)

·       Working with perception sensors such as stereo cameras and LiDAR

·       Interfacing with hardware, including IO and motor drives (e.g., CAN / EtherCAT)

·       Computer vision, classification, target tracking

·       Inverse kinematics and path planning for manipulators

·       Modern A.I. in robotics

·       Putting out fires caused by PCBs

·       Taming wild Co-Ops

·       Handling petabytes of data

·       Interfacing with traditional Dutch mushroom farmers

Location

This role will be based in Salmon Arm, British Columbia.

Occasional travel to our HQ, testing farm, and customer deployments will be required.

Benefits & Perks

We want people to do great work, build interesting things, and have a life outside of work too.

·       Competitive salary and performance-based bonus

·       Extended health, dental, and vision coverage, plus an annual healthcare spending account

·       Flexible, results-focused work

·       Professional development and opportunities to keep learning and growing

·       Newly renovated, 38,000 sqft headquarters facility in the Shuswap with an on-site gym, bar, and lounge.

·       Lunch provided three times a week at HQ, with snacks and drinks always available

·       Employee perks and discounts with local businesses throughout the Shuswap

·       Relocation assistance

Life in the Shuswap

4AG Robotics is headquartered in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, in the heart of the Shuswap. It’s a place where you can build ambitious technology and still spend your evenings on the lake, hit the South Canoe mountain-bike and hiking trails at lunch, or spend winter weekends skiing at Sun Peaks, SilverStar, or Revelstoke. 

With a population of around 20,000, Salmon Arm offers the services and amenities of a growing community with some of the best access to the outdoors in Canada. The region has an affordable cost of living, over 600 km of local trails and regular community events. If you can picture yourself building robots at work and then getting out to enjoy the Thompson-Okanagan, we'd be happy to tell you more about the area.