Machine Vision Applications EngineerSan Francisco, CA • Applications • Full-time, in office
THE OPPORTUNITYWe're looking for a Machine Vision Applications Engineer to own imaging feasibility in our San Francisco lab.
Customer samples arrive here before anything gets deployed. Your job is to make the defect visible: work out the lighting, the lens, the camera, the geometry, and prove the imaging holds up repeatably. That work is what every successful deployment is built on, and right now it is the bottleneck between a customer's hardest inspection problem and a system that solves it.
This is a hands-on role. You will spend your days with real parts, real optics, and real lighting, running trials and documenting what works and why. If you have been doing this inside a vision vendor, a distributor, or an integrator and want the same work with more ownership and a harder class of problem, this is that job.
WHY THIS ROLE IS EXCITING- You own the lab: The SF lab is yours to run, from testing standards to hardware evaluation to how we decide an application is feasible.
- Hard problems, by design: Customers come to us with inspections that defeated traditional machine vision for years. The easy imaging problems never reach your bench.
- Volume and variety: A growing stream of customer samples across automotive, aerospace, and consumer manufacturing means you see more imaging problems in a year here than most engineers see in five.
- Your findings travel: What you learn in the lab shapes hardware decisions, deployment approaches, and what we tell customers is possible.
- Room to grow into it: This is a mid-level role with a clear path to becoming the technical voice on imaging as the lab and the team scale.
WHAT YOU'LL OWN- Imaging feasibility: Run trials on incoming customer samples to determine whether and how an inspection can be imaged reliably.
- Lighting and optics selection: Choose and configure lighting, lenses, cameras, filters, and geometry for each application, including the parts that fight back.
- Lab ownership: Set up and run the SF lab: test standards, hardware inventory, sample handling, and how results get recorded.
- Proof-of-concept testing: Build and document POCs that give Sales and Applications a defensible answer on what the system can and cannot do.
- Image quality troubleshooting: Diagnose and resolve image quality problems that drive false rejects, missed defects, and inconsistent results.
- Hardware evaluation: Test new cameras, lenses, and lighting and recommend what belongs in our stack.
- Findings and documentation: Write up what worked, what did not, and why, so the next engineer facing the same part does not start over.
WHO YOU ARERequired- Hands-on experience selecting and configuring lighting, lenses, and cameras to image parts for inspection or measurement.
- Experience running imaging trials, feasibility studies, or proof-of-concept testing on customer or production samples in a lab or demo environment.
- Working knowledge of optical trade-offs: lens selection, field of view, working distance, depth of field, and resolution.
- Comfortable working directly with hardware, running your own experiments, and solving problems independently.
- Able to document findings clearly and explain technical trade-offs to customers and internal teams.
- Based in the San Francisco Bay Area or willing to relocate, and able to work primarily from our SF office.
Strong Preferences- Experience imaging difficult parts: reflective, specular, transparent, dark, or low-contrast surfaces.
- Experience with advanced lighting techniques: dome, dark field, backlight, coaxial, polarized, or structured lighting.
- Experience with telecentric optics and precision measurement.
- Customer-facing technical work: demos, application support, or on-site troubleshooting.
- Experience troubleshooting inspection performance in production: false rejects, missed defects, image quality variation.
- Familiarity with traditional machine vision software tools (Cognex, Keyence, Matrox, Halcon, Dalsa).
