Full-Time

People Operations Specialist

Updated on 2/20/2025

Blue River Technology

Blue River Technology

201-500 employees

Develops agricultural robotics for optimized farming

Food & Agriculture
Robotics & Automation
AI & Machine Learning

Compensation Overview

$91k - $137kAnnually

+ Bonus + Benefit Programs

Junior, Mid

Santa Clara, CA, USA

This position is hybrid, requiring in-office presence 2-3 days per month.

Category
Human Resources
People & HR
Required Skills
Customer Service
Excel/Numbers/Sheets
PowerPoint/Keynote/Slides

You match the following Blue River Technology's candidate preferences

Employers are more likely to interview you if you match these preferences:

Degree
Experience
Requirements
  • Bachelor’s degree in HR, Business, or equivalent.
  • 2+ years of HR and onboarding experience.
  • Experience with Microsoft Office (Excel, PowerPoint) G-Suite, Slack.
  • Solid understanding of the employee lifecycle, and how to create a great employee experience.
  • Experience supporting fast-moving and constantly changing organizations, building and refining processes, innovating on People team offerings, and managing projects.
  • Customer-focused attitude with a high level of professionalism.
  • Sound judgment and problem-solving skills.
  • Excellent communication skills and ability to build relationships across the organization.
Responsibilities
  • Support our onboarding for full-time and contingent workers - from offer acceptance to the first day, ensuring a positive employee experience.
  • Manage our HRIS system (ADP) onboarding for Full-time and Temporary employees as well as our payroll system (Deel) for contingent hires.
  • Be the main point of contact for new employees/contractors to ensure a great employee experience at Blue River.
  • Work with the People team stakeholders and others to constantly improve our onboarding processes and experience.
  • Conduct ad hoc new hire training as needed.
  • Support Sr Total Rewards Manager with our employee visa filings - tracking, communicating, scheduling, etc.
  • Respond and triage requests on our employee ticketing system, ensuring timely resolutions, including employment verification requests.
  • Run, review, format, and distribute specific reports on a regular cadence.
  • Support benefits, payroll, and other Total Rewards functions.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience with ADP.
  • Hands-on experience with benefits, immigration, and compliance.
  • Experience running weekly orientation meetings.
  • Knowledge of payroll and HRIS system.
Blue River Technology

Blue River Technology

View

Blue River Technology develops advanced agricultural robots designed to enhance farming efficiency and reduce chemical usage. Their machinery utilizes computer vision and machine learning to identify crops and weeds, allowing for precise application of chemicals only where needed. This targeted approach not only improves crop yields but also lessens the environmental impact of farming practices. Unlike many competitors, Blue River Technology focuses on integrating intelligent technology into traditional farming methods, providing farmers with tools that are both effective and sustainable. The company's goal is to transform agriculture by addressing key challenges and promoting sustainable practices that benefit both farmers and the environment.

Company Size

201-500

Company Stage

Acquired

Total Funding

$29.3M

Headquarters

Sunnyvale, California

Founded

2011

Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • CRISPR technology integration could enhance robotic systems for precise crop management.
  • De novo domestication offers market expansion opportunities for new crop types.
  • Rising demand for reduced chemical usage aligns with their see and spray technology.

What critics are saying

  • Competition from Ecorobotix and Naio Technologies may impact market share.
  • Shift towards genetically engineered crops could reduce demand for traditional weeding.
  • Legal acceptance of gene-editing may outpace current technological offerings.

What makes Blue River Technology unique

  • Blue River Technology uses see and spray technology to optimize chemical usage.
  • Their systems leverage computer vision and machine learning for plant recognition.
  • They focus on reducing environmental impact through intelligent agricultural machinery.

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Benefits

Paid Time Off

Sick Leave

Paid Parental Leave

Adoption Benefit

Subsidized Lunches

Flexible Work Hours

Collaborative and Supportive Environment

Medical Package

Company News

Securities.io
Apr 26th, 2024
Advancing Agriculture With Ai And Genetic Engineering – The Future Of Cultivation

Creating New Food CropsSince the dawn of agriculture, mankind has turned wild weeds into domesticated crops, which have higher nutritional content, better taste, are easier to harvest, and have larger seeds.However, modern breeding of food crops has resulted in selection for traits like a stronger response to fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation, resulting in more fragile varieties that are dependent on high-input agricultural systems.Climate change, soil erosion, invasive species, and weeds have created strong pressure on these over-selected crops.This process of domestication was also slow and “blind”, with new traits randomly discovered and selected over decades if not centuries.Most of the world's crops come from a handful of “domestication events” in a few regions of the world, leaving plenty of possible domestication to be done.For now, new selection and breeding procedures of crops by agricultural firms have been focused on adding traits like water-stress resistance or pest and disease resistance to modern crops, with mixed results.The main issue is that a lot of these desirable traits identified in wild species are multigenic, created by many genes, often dozens or even hundreds of them, making genetic modification of cultivated crops close to impossible.Another option is emerging, called “de novo domestication”. The idea is that instead of taking high-yield modern crops and trying to make them as resistant as wild weeds, why not take already resistant wild weeds and make them as productive as modern crops?New Crops And New ProblemsCreating New Food SourcesThe traits desirable in a cultivated crop variety tend to be less complex, often directed by just one or a handful of genes. In addition, these genetic features are generally well understood.So, the de novo domestication approach has the potential to produce new types of crops that could display resistance to environmental shifts and good enough yield and characteristics as food.Especially when you take into account new tools like CRISPR, that allow for very specific and controlled gene editing, including adding and removing a gene, or editing specific bases of an existing gene. Considering that CRISPR is now being approved for gene therapies in humans, it is likely that the legal framework for CRISPR-edited crops will open up in many countries.The technical details of how it could be done can be found in scientific publications, for example, “ Future-Proofing Agriculture: De Novo Domestication for Sustainable and Resilient Crops ”.Getting Lost In The WeedsAn issue that arises by turning weeds into food crops is that, obviously, the new crops will be very similar to weeds. In the article “ De novo domestication: what about the weeds? ”, researchers at the University of Copenhagen looked at this question.In it, they admit that the traditional GMO approach to weed management (herbicide resistance) is unsustainable and causes too much pollution.Instead, they propose that robotic weeding technology could be boosted by genetic engineering to create a much more environmentally friendly weed management system.When Advanced Robotics Meet Advanced Gene EditingRobots Weeding FieldsThe de novo crops (and potentially, modified existing crop varieties as well) could be modified to make their identification easy for weeding robots.This could be a boon for farming robots, a topic we discussed in our article “ Investors Should Take Note: Robotics Is Taking Over Farming ”, where we presented a variety of weeding robots:Ecorobotix ’srobot combines machine vision with precision spraying to reduce by up to 95% the volume of pesticide and herbicide used.’srobot combines machine vision with precision spraying to reduce by up to 95% the volume of pesticide and herbicide used. Naio Technologies aims to remove herbicide from the field fully, with a 5-ton autonomous robot driving the field and shredding or uprooting the weeds with small blades

Securities.io
Jan 30th, 2023
Investors Should Take Note: Robots Are Taking Over Farming

In pre-modern time, most of the economic activity was driven by the primary sector: farming, husbandry and other food production. With the industrial revolution, our economies have been increasingly driven by first industry, then services. This made the primary sector, while still responsible for the vital task of food production, increasingly invisible in terms of economics.A key factor was the mechanization of farming. In poor, under-developed regions like Africa, farming can be the livelihood of a majority of the population and is responsible for as much as 15% of GDP. In countries like the US, farming is less than 1% of GDP.Mechanization and industrial farming led to several trends, almost all of them detrimental to the environment:Expansion of massive monocultures over thousands of acres, instead of diversified ecosystems with hedges, multiples species, etc…Massive dependence on chemical fertilizers.Intensive use of pesticides and herbicides, leading to ecological damage and water pollution.Degradation of soils fertility from deep plowing, fertilizers, fungicide, and compaction under the weight of increasingly large tractors.Decline in biodiversity of crops, with just a handful of varieties representing often 80%-90% of total production.Lower nutritional value of the food produced.This is not sustainable. Bees’ population is threatened by “colony Collapse Disorder” , likely triggered by pesticides